Pachucas, pachucos, and their culture: Mexican American youth culture of the Southwest, 1910-1955

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Content PACHUCAS, PACHUCOS, AND THEIR CULTURE:
MEXICAN AMERICAN YOUTH CULTURE OF THE SOUTHWEST, 1910-1955

by
Gerardo Licón

____________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Gerardo Licón

ii

DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation to my family: Antonio Licón, Ana Maria Licón,
Gustavo Licón, Claudia Tonantzín Corral, and La Familia Esparza de Juchitlán,
Jalisco, Mexico.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This accomplishment would not have been possible without the assistance I
received from a series of role models and mentors who provided me with
opportunities for my hard work to bear fruit. First and foremost are my parents who
migrated to the United States and provided an example of honesty, humility, and
hard work. Ms. Ra’oof was the Inglewood High School history teacher who inspired
me to learn racial and ethnic history, and teach it to others. Nati Vasquez inspired
me with the history of the Chicano Movement and acquainted me with the resources
at Santa Monica College that helped me transfer to a four year university. Dr. Larry
Trujillo and Rosalee Cabrera, at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC),
provided me with the resources I needed to get accepted and succeed in graduate
school. At the University of Southern California (USC) George J. Sanchez mentored
and advised me throughout my graduate education. I will never finish repaying him
for his counsel and support. During the latter half of writing this dissertation, when I
hit a plateau, my brother Gustavo Licón reenergized me to complete my Ph.D.
Finally, no one has endured more hardship due to my graduate education, than my
loving wife Claudia Tonantzín Corral. I am eternally thankful for your sacrifice.
There are many faculty, staff, graduate students, and volunteers who played a
positive role in my graduate career and the following is surely an incomplete list.
Among the faculty who mentored and advised me are: Lon Kurashige, Jane
Iwamura, Mauricio Mazon, Terry Seip, Pedro Castillo, Lisbeth Haas, Luis Alvarez,

iv

Susan M. Green, Teresa McKenna, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Ernesto Chavez, Lydia
Otero, and Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez.
My interactions with graduate students were just as instrumental as the ones
with faculty, and the following is a list of some of the most influential graduate
students (some of which are now faculty): Ana E. Rosas, Christopher Jimenez y
West, Belinda Lum, Rigoberto Rodriguez, Ilda Jimenez y West, Hillary Jenks, Laura
Barraclough, James Thing, the members of Haciendo Historia, Jerry B. Gonzalez,
Isabela Quintana, Julie Weiss, Milo M. Alvarez, Laura S. Fujikawa, Luis Carlos
Rodriguez, and Miguel M. Chavez. The assistance of the staff from both the
Department of History and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at
USC was invaluable, thank you; Sonia Rodriguez, La Verne Hughes, Kitty Lai,
Sandra Hopwood, Lori Rogers, and Joseph Styles.
Finally, I thank the people who made my research possible when I was out in
the field. Some shared their time with me so that I could interview them, or helped
me find interviewees. Others allowed me to sleep in their homes, or fed me. Thank
you: Veronica Martinez, Oscar Martinez, Pascua Neighborhood Center, Rebecca
Tapia, Tommy Sandoval, Jose Ramon Estrella, Jesus Osuna, Albert Moreno, Albert
Moreno Jr., Rosa Moreno, Laura Lee Cummings, Ramon Olivas Sr., Ramon Olivas
Jr., and Antonio Reyes Lopez.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables vi
List of Figures vii
Abstract viii
Introduction 1
PART I: ORIGINS, PRECURSORS, AND IMMIGRATION: 1880-1943
Chapter One: A History of Pachuco History and Knowledge 30
Chapter Two: El Paso, Juarez, and the Great Mexican Migration 76
Chapter Three: Mexican and Native American Tucson 117
PART II: POST ZOOT SUIT RIOTS SPREAD OF PACHUQUISMO
Chapter Four: Tucson and Its Post-Riot Pachuquismo 144
Chapter Five: Pachuquismo in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico 179
Conclusion 205
Bibliography 207
Appendix: Select References 214

vi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: El Paso Demographics by Thousands, 1900-1950 85
Table 2: Special U.S. Census of El Paso, 1916 86

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: 1920s Map of El Paso, Texas 80
Figure 2: Tucson Neighborhoods 124
Figure 3: Yaqui Pascola Mask 127
Figure 4: Pachuco Tattoo of the Cross 128
Figure 5: Most Popular Placement of Cross Tattoo 129

viii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation addresses the origins and development of pachuco culture
from the first decade of the twentieth century to the 1950s. The most popular
definition of pachucos refers to Mexican American youth who wore zoot suits during
World War II in Los Angeles. The author argues for a more nuanced and locally
distinct understanding of pachuco culture. Specific attention is paid to the Mexican
influences of pachuco culture in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the Native American
influences in Tucson, the African American influences in Los Angeles, and the
Mexican American influences in Mexico City. The findings of this dissertation are
compared and contrasted with the scholarship on zoot culture which focuses on Los
Angeles, the Zoot Suit Riots, and the Sleepy Lagoon Case.

1

INTRODUCTION

Pachuco Calo English
nos dice el cácaro the guy tells us
“pues yo sé onde hay un “well I know where there’s a
rescla” restaurant”
pues órale pues Well alright
¿no trae un nicolás con usted? You got a nickel on you?
búfalo ése, un búfalo ése buffalo, man. A buffalo, man.
y el vato nos dice and the guy tell us
“pues no sé lo que dicen ustedes” “well I don’t understand you guys”
bueno ése well man
usted parece guacho por derecho you’re like a straight-up square
pues el vato se caldea well the guy gets hot
Se nos viene encima, ése. He lunges after us, man.
Pues fíjate que abusada Well, see how agile
la chavala, ése. this girl was, man
Se pone abusada She was ready
y a darle un piedrón, and hits him with a stone
y se le deja ir, ese, and goes after him, man
y pone al cácaro sufriendo... and makes the guy suffer...
Órale pues, Alright then
le da en la chompa she hits him on the chin
y lo tumba ése and drops him, man
con un pie y una roca with a kick and a rock
en el coco, ése... to the skull, man...
¡Simón que sí! Truchona, ése. Right on! Agile, man.
pos si luego nos borramos de alli well then we scrammed out of there
veh?
1
see?

The vignette above is a recounting of an incident told by a Mexican
American self-identified pachuco nicknamed Crow. His account of the incident was
recorded in 1947 and this audio recording still exists in 2009. The incident occurred
in El Chuco (El Paso, Texas) when he and Meluche were en route to visit her cousin

1
University of Arizona Special Collections 85-2/R1. George C. Barker Collection. Southwest
Folklore Center. Edited Copy of Audio Recording. Recorded in 1947.

2

in Juarilez (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico). When they arrived in El Paso
Texas they decided to look for a restaurant and came across a man who told them he
knew of one. Crow proceeded to ask this man if he could spare a “nicolas” but
noticed the man did not understand his pachuco caló dialect.
2
So Crow went on to
rephrase what he meant, “búfalo ése, un búfalo ése.”
3
The man still failed to
understand Crow’s expression so he called the man a “guacho.” Feeling insulted, the
man lunged at Crow but was surprised by a stone throw to the head from Meluche
that brought him to his knees. She followed with a kick to the jaw and another stone
to his head that dropped him to the ground. “¡Simón que sí! Truchona, ése,” Crow
yelled in excitement to demonstrate he was pleased with Meluche’s actions.
This dissertation argues that Crow and Meluche’s experience is significant to
historical understandings of the United States during the 1940s, the Southwest, and
Mexican American youth culture. The vignette brings attention to the types of
narratives missing from the academic monographs addressing pachucos. To begin
with, this incident took place in El Paso Texas, not in Los Angeles where pachucos
are stereotypically placed. Additionally, the pachucos were from Tucson, Arizona
and were on their way to Ciudad Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua which
reveals pachuco culture was a regional and even transnational phenomenon, not one
isolated in Los Angeles. It also begins to inform us about other facets of pachuco
culture such as geographic mobility along with tensions and influences with people

2
By nicolas, the pachuco was referring to a nickel.

3
By búfalo, the pachuco was referring to a buffalo nickel.

3

in other parts of the Southwest. These are all significant revelations that are largely
absent from published historical scholarship. Furthermore, this incident
demonstrates the participation of women in pachuco culture to an unprecedented
degree through their practice of violent actions. When Meluche defended her
companion, she both deviated from “proper” feminine behavior and outdid Crow in
aggressiveness. Moreover, it was a male pachuco who chose to retell the story to
another male pachuco, giving credit to his female counterpart for being abusada and
truchona, caló synonyms for someone who is mentally and physically agile.
Regardless of whether this incident factually took place, the fact that a self-identified
pachuco recounted this story to an anthropologist in the late forties as a
representation of how pachucos talked and what they talked about demonstrates
facets of pachuco culture that are not typically addressed by the scholarship on the
topic. As indicated by this story, and as substantiated by the other stories shared by
this pachuco, there is frequent discussion of contact and influence to and from other
cities, so these pachuco cultural practices are not isolated to a single place as is often
implied by the scholarship on Los Angeles.
This introduction explains the meta-narrative of the entire dissertation,
introduces the underpinning cultural theory, defines the most significant terms, and
most importantly, summarizes the historiography and this work’s historiographic
interventions. The overarching narrative and organizing theme of this work begins
with pachuco culture originating with the youth of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in the
early 1930s, the culture making its way through Tucson to Los Angeles, and the

4

events that took place in Los Angeles in 1942 and 1943 were watershed moments
that both, defined and spread pachuco culture to other ethnic Mexican communities
in the Southwest and major cities in Mexico. El Paso Texas, Tucson Arizona, and
Ciudad Juarez Mexico, are the three sites this study focuses on to tell the history of
pachuco culture. With Mexican American youth at the center, this work
demonstrates that intercultural contact and exchange was frequent and significant.
My scholarship makes an intervention in Chicano history by emphasizing the
significance of the youth and their culture, instead of the Zoot Suit Riots and the
Sleepy Lagoon case as the bulk of the scholarship has done.
4
The Sleepy Lagoon
Case refers to a court case that began in 1942 in which 17 Mexican American youths
were convicted for the murder of another youth. The Zoot Suit Riots occurred in Los
Angeles in June of 1943 and they primarily consisted of Anglo servicemen beating
up, and tearing up the zoot suits of Mexican American youth.
Academic discussions concerning pachucos and their culture began
immediately after the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots. Scholars like
Carey McWilliams and Guy Endore initiated the conversation which historian
Eduardo Pagan recently referred to as the “anti-Mexican hysteria thesis,” which
oversimplified a complex social dialogue into one in which all was explained with

4
Endore, S. Guy. The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery. San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1943;
McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. [1st ] ed,
The Peoples of America Series;. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1949; Pagan, Eduardo Obregon.
Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2003.

5

wartime racism against ethnic Mexicans and their consequent victimization.
5
This
basic thesis, with the addition of the pachuco as a rebellious icon, was propagated
during the 1960s and 1970s via the cultural and academic production of the Chicano
movement. Feminist critiques of the cultural works produced during the Chicano
movement abounded during the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately these discussions
did not make a significant presence in historical monographs during the 1980s and
1990s. This is explained in part with the low number of academic works on the
subject during these decades.
The first full-length history book on the subject, The Zoot Suit Riots, by
Mauricio Mazon was not published until 1984.
6
Mazon’s work went a long way in
explaining, from a psycho-historical perspective, why servicemen and civilians
rioted and why the printed media reacted as it did against pachucos. Mazon
essentially argued that during a time of “total war,” the serviceman represented the
hero archetype. Conversely and simultaneously, there also existed the need for an
enemy. After the internment of Japanese Americans, pachucos in Los Angeles were
the most conspicuous prospective enemy or anti-hero.
After Mazon’s monograph, Eduardo Pagan published the most focused and
extensive work on Los Angeles, zoot suiters, the Zoot Suit Riots, and the Sleepy
Lagoon Case. His is an excellent work that finally complicated the topic with
nuanced analysis. Pagan, for example, demonstrated that not all sleepy lagoon

5
Pagan, 9-10.

6
Mazon, Mauricio. The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1984.

6

defendants were Mexican American, that there were Anglo community activists that
were more supportive of the defendants than the Mexican American middle class,
and he also debunked the notion that zoot suits were exclusively worn by Mexican
American youth. In fact, he emphasized the extensive influence of African
Americans and their culture on Mexican American youth.
Pagan’s monograph was a substantial improvement over all the previous
academic works, but the scholarship published during the last decade, especially that
of Luis Alvarez and Catherine Sue Ramirez, made significant contributions. Power
of the Zoot, published by historian Luis Alvarez in 2008, built upon the foundation
laid by Pagan and advanced the scholarship.
7
Whereas Pagan summarized the Los
Angeles scene and emphasized the African American influence on Mexican
American youth, Alvarez broadened the scope with a bi-coastal perspective and also
focused the scope by adding the specifics of the cultural geography within Los
Angeles. He took Pagan’s explanation of the African Americans influence to
another level by seriously addressing and comparing Central Avenue in Los Angeles
and Harlem in New York. Alvarez argued that non-white youth were dehumanized
in the home front by racial segregation and discrimination in employment, housing
and public services. This first half of his major argument is similar to the Anti-
Mexican Hysteria Thesis.
The second half of Alvarez’s major argument, however, is a novel
contribution to the field. In this part of his argument, he asserts that wearing of a

7
Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II,
American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008.

7

zoot suit and participating in jazz culture in Los Angeles and New York were ways
in which non-white youth sought to claim dignity and inclusion into the national
polity. This dissertation continues the conversation along this vein with the notion of
competing hierarchies. In congruence with Alvarez’ position, pachucos sought
dignity and respect through their participation in pachuco and zoot culture. I name
this phenomenon competing hierarchies, to point out that pachucos sought to claim
dignity via a cultural avenue that did not rest on getting approval, dignity or respect,
from mainstream society. Instead they created their own cultural hierarchy. One in
which they could be at the top of, and hence gain dignity without depending on
getting it from mainstream cultural norms. Cultural hierarchies are explained further
in the theory section of this Introduction.
The Woman in the Zoot Suit by Catherine Sue Ramirez is the latest published
work at the time this dissertation was completed.
8
Ramirez did the field of zoot
culture a great service by advancing the discussion by leaps and bounds with regard
to the degree to which female participants of zoot culture were understood
historically. Ultimately, Ramirez concluded that the scholarship on zoot culture
neglected women, their experiences, and their perspectives. The placement of
pachucas at the center of the topic produces new understandings for the construction
of American nationalism during World War II and Chicano cultural nationalism
during the 1960s and 1970s.

8
Ramirez, Catherine Sue. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural
Politics of Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

8

The present dissertation enters the academic conversations on zoot culture
making some important contributions and interventions. The most obvious
intervention is based on the fact that, with the exception of Alvarez’ inclusion of
New York, the historiography on the topic is overwhelmingly geographically limited
to the experiences in the city of Los Angeles. My scholarship advances our
understanding of the field by incorporating Tucson, El Paso, and Ciudad Juarez to
the discussion.
Before Alvarez and Ramirez, the discussion was primarily focused on the
Zoot Suit Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon Case instead of the youth and their culture.
The Riots were an unusual and irrational incident whose analysis reveals more about
Anglo servicemen, local political leadership and law enforcement than it does about
the youth who were targeted or their community. In this sense the present work
continues the conversation that Alvarez and Ramirez initiated.
While almost all the works which preceded the current dissertation alluded to
the theory that pachuco culture originated in El Paso Texas, none delved into the
veracity of the prospect. This dissertation devotes two chapters to El Paso, Texas
and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Also, this dissertation does not conflate the zoot suit, with the pachuco, as
many works have done. I argue pachuco culture existed before, during and after the
zoot suit was in fashion during World War II.
Most works on the topic addressed the World War II period exclusively.
Alvarez did address the 1930s for both Los Angeles and Harlem. However, my

9

dissertation is the only work to trace pachuco culture, and its cultural antecedents, to
the 1900s along the border. Whereas Ramirez discussed the scholarship produced on
the topic during the 1960s, this dissertation is the only one to continuously trace the
developments of pachuco culture itself throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s.
This is relevant to studies of U.S. history more broadly because it helps explain the
WWII period, not in isolation or cut off from the before and after, but in connection
with the pre and post WWII periods. This dissertation also documents the long term
incorporation of an immigrant and racial group into mainstream society.
Contemporarily, alongside the Mexican immigration debates, there has been
a thread of inquiry which asks why Mexican Americans have not assimilated into
mainstream society. This dissertation helps explain how Mexican Americans
assimilated, but on their own terms, during the first half of United States history. It
also demonstrates that the circumstances for the creation of separatism among ethnic
groups and street gangs were the product of social relations in the United States and
not brought from Mexico.
The aforementioned contributions and interventions on the topic are
significant and relevant to studies of Chicano history, U.S. history, cultural studies,
studies of youth culture, and Southwestern history. The incorporation of Tucson and
El Paso to the studies based on Los Angeles, for example, helps us learn not only
about the added locations, but Los Angeles as well by demonstrating what cultural
aspects were held in common and which were unique to the City of Angels. The
addition of Tucson helps explain how pachuco culture was different in an

10

environment that was less urban and with a large Native American population. The
addition of Ciudad Juarez is also relevant to Chicano history, borderlands studies,
and Mexican history in that it helps us understand the degree to which Mexican
culture and immigration played a role in the origins, spread, and development of
pachuco culture. Did pachuco culture come from Mexico, or was it an American
phenomenon?
This dissertation is important to Southwestern history because it is centrally
focused on the United States’ Southwest. It puts the histories of individual
southwestern cities and states in conversation with each other and, as such, furthers
Southwestern history in general. The cultural history of the border towns of El Paso
and Ciudad Juarez are not only in conversation with each other, but also with that of
major cities further from the border such as Los Angeles and Mexico City.
This dissertation is not only relevant to the field of youth culture because of
its focus, its theoretical arguments further the cultural theory applied to the field.
This dissertation also puts youth culture in conversation with ethnic and mainstream
cultures.
The most obvious academic field this dissertation is relevant to is Chicano
History, as it de-centers Los Angeles and incorporates the whole Southwest into the
discussion on pachuco culture. The fact that this dissertation emphasizes the youth
and the Mexican American community instead of the Riots or the murder case makes
it relevant to Chicano History.

11

Overall this is an investigation into one segment of the early to mid 20
th

century youth population and their response to the cultural ebbs and flows of society.
Prior to pachuquismo, second generation ethnic Mexicans could either identify with
the U.S. or the country of their parents’ origin. With pachuquismo, the second
generation borrowed from both cultures, created their own culture, and developed it
into its own cultural entity. This is not to say that all Mexican Americans became
pachucos, nor to argue that pachuquismo was the only avenue through which to
express an identity that was neither Mexican nor American; what I do claim is that it
was one of, and possibly THE, most concrete and popular cultural manifestation to
identify as neither Mexican, nor mainstream American.
This dissertation also contributes to the argument that the World War II
generation initiated civil rights activism for desegregation. It does so by
demonstrating that not only World War II veterans, but also civilian women and
youth of color were claimed their rights to be integrated in public and private spaces
prior to, and during, World War II.
A final contribution this dissertation makes is that pathological stereotypes of
pachucos are redefined by revealing that some pachucos went on to become
successful musicians, authors, and even political leaders, such as Don Tosti, Renato
Rosaldo, and Cesar Chavez.
9

9
Ferris, Susan; Sandoval, Ricardo; Hembree, Diana, ed. The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and
the Farmworkers Movement. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.; Macias, Anthony Foster. Mexican
American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968: Duke
University Press, 2008.; Montezemolo, Fiamma. "Conversando Con Renato Rosaldo." Revista de
Antropologia Social 12 (2003): 321-345.

12

Before delving into the specific dynamics of mid-twentieth century Tucson,
El Paso, Juarez, and Los Angeles, it is important to have a general understanding of
the demographic and socioeconomic histories of these southwestern cities. Before El
Paso, Tucson, and Los Angeles became part of the United States of America, they
were part of Mexico. Before that, they were part of New Spain, and before that, they
existed by different names (all except Tucson) that were part of indigenous lands.
As of 1848 when the U.S. took political control of northern Mexico and the area
became the U.S. Southwest, various indigenous groups had constituted the majority
of inhabitants of the U.S. Southwest for centuries. In the cities of Los Angeles and
Tucson, Mexicans and local Indian groups were often indistinguishable to Anglo
Americans (and sometimes to the modern researcher) because Mexicans were the
result of centuries of miscegenation with Indians and because many Indian tribes and
individuals had been westernized to varying degrees and given Spanish names by the
Spaniards. Anglo Americans inherited Spanish labels for Native American groups of
the Southwest such as the Papagos, Fernandiños, and Yaqui.
Mexicans who remained in the U.S. a year after the end of the War between
the United States of America and Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos were promised
American citizenship with the same rights accorded to the U.S. born. The first
generation of Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest had to adjust to Anglo culture along
with new inhabitants, laws and economy. Some Mexicans and Americans of
Mexican descent had a difficult time adjusting to the new culture and their
subservient status, so they turned to revolt. Joaquin Murieta in California and Juan

13

N. Cortina in Texas are two of the social bandits that emerged immediately
following the end of the Mexican American War.
10
Mexican immigration to the U.S.
Southwest was minimal from 1848 until the 1870s. The migration that did occur
between the U.S. and Mexico during this period was regional and circuitous.
When the U.S. completed the Transcontinental railroad in 1869, the U.S.
economy boomed and industrialization came to the Southwest to an unprecedented
degree. Railroads in Mexico were also built during the latter half of the nineteenth
century and since they were largely built by American investors, they were primarily
built to transport raw materials to the U.S., rather than to improve transportation or
the economy of Mexico. After the Transcontinental railroad was built, efforts began
to build railroads linking other parts of the country and to link the Mexican and U.S.
lines. Many ethnic Mexicans were contracted to build railroads, and many were
hired from the interior of Mexico by the railroad companies. Mexican immigration
to the U.S. grew during the 1880s but it remained only a fragment of the total
immigration to the U.S. which was primarily European at the time.
In 1880 legislation was passed to bar Chinese immigration to the U.S. This
was the result of anti-Chinese sentiment caused by the immigration of Chinese male
laborers that helped build the transcontinental railroads in the 1860s and 1870s.
During the 1890s and early twentieth century, a greater percentage of immigrants
came from Eastern and Southern Europe, as opposed to immigrants from Britain and
the Scandinavian countries which were seen by Americans as the most desirable and

10
Castillo, Pedro & Albert Camarillo, ed. Furia Y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos. Los Angeles:
Aztlan Publications, 1973.

14

culturally compatible. By the 1920s many Americans were weary of the Eastern and
Southern European immigrants because they had not only come in large numbers,
but had also begun to organize into unions and came from countries involved in the
First World War. During the 1920s laws were passed to drastically curtail their
numbers into the U.S. Coupled with a strong American economy, one result of these
laws was an increased demand for Mexican laborers.
Mexican immigration during the 1920s was proportionately the largest wave
of Mexican immigration of the 20
th
century. It is with this immigration that the
central narrative of this dissertation begins. While cities like El Paso, Los Angeles
and Tucson continued to have a significant number of ethnic Mexicans into the
1910s, it was in the 1920s that Mexican communities in the Southwest were
reinforced with larger numbers of residents and Mexican-influenced institutions.
11

One million Mexicans, approximately 10% of the Mexican population, came to the
U.S. during the 1920s. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants came
through the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez border, where this dissertation begins
chronologically.
The most commonly held theory regarding the origins of pachuco culture is
that the first ethnic Mexican youth to be referred to as “pachucos” were from El

11
Garcia, Mario T. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981.Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American : Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.; Sheridan,
Thomas E. Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941. Tucson & London:
University of Arizona Press, 1992.

15

Paso, Texas.
12
This theory was introduced by George C. Barker in 1950 and has
been often repeated by later scholars without much attention to the feasibility of the
theory.
13
Chapter 2 “El Paso, Juarez, and the Great Migration” addresses the role of
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez as the primary point of entry for Mexicans into the U.S.
from 1870s to the 1940s. This chapter analyzes the railroad routes, immigration, and
cultural influences in these two border towns.
For those living close to the border during prohibition, it was easier to get
alcohol from Mexico than to make moonshine. This dissertation argues that ethnic
Mexican black-market smugglers were direct cultural precursors of pachucos. This
occurred before zoot suits existed anywhere in the U.S. These smugglers saw
themselves as, or aimed to become, the equivalents of Al Capone-type mobsters in
Chicago. During the 1920s, along with the largest wave of immigration from
Mexico also came the spread of pachuco-type cultural aspects to other U.S. cities.
Jazz and the flapper style were not only popular in El Paso, Texas, but also in Ciudad
Juarez, Chihuahua Mexico. At this time, El Paso was the port of entry for most
Mexicans into the U.S. Mexican immigrants followed the railroad tracks that came
from El Paso, through Tucson Arizona, and into Los Angeles as well as other routes.
The overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants did not become pachucos, but

12
Barker, George Carpenter. "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in
Tucson, Arizona." Social science bulletin; no. 18; University of Arizona Bulletin Series; v. 21, no. 1;
(1950): 38.

13
Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots,; Ortega, Adolfo. Calo Tapestry. Berkeley, California, 1977.; Pagan,
Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon,; Serrano, Rodolfo G. Dictionary of Pachuco Terms:
A Collection of Words, Phrases, Conversations, and Songs as They Originally Appeared in Published
Form. Bakersfield, Calif.: Serrano, 1979.

16

most of them had no formal education, spoke a slang of their own, and both learned
and created more pochismos (spanglish) the longer they stayed in the U.S. Single
immigrant men soon learned to understand the pachuco dialect of calo, and
informally taught it to others as they migrated to other parts of the U.S. This process
spread the seeds of pachuquismo to come.
By the early 1930s many aspects of pachuco culture had made their way to
Tucson, Arizona. Interviewees in Tucson recall hearing calo at the workplace and in
elementary schools during the 1930s. During the 1930s the poorest residents were
Native Americans (Yaquis and Tohono O’odhom) as well as ethnic Mexicans who
made up approximately 40% of the city’s population. Interviewees recall
impoverished Native Americans among the first people referred to as pachucos.
14

Pachuco culture was infused with a local flavor that incorporated some aspects of
Native American culture. The Yaqui Indians, in particular, practiced religious
ceremonies that made use of Christian crosses on different parts of face masks.
Tucson Native American pachucos are recalled as having a tattoo cross on their face,
either under the lip or on their forehead, just like their ceremonial masks.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, many pachucos in Los Angeles were
found with the tattoo of the cross on their hands, instead of their face. The cultural
influences from Tucson, El Paso and Juarez are evident in the tattoo of the cross, as
well as the music produced by Don Tosti (from El Paso) and Lalo Guerrero (from
Tucson) while in Los Angeles. There is also much evidence of migratory travel from

14
Cummings, Laura Lee. "Que Siga El Corrido: Tucson Pachucos and Their Times." Ph.D. Diss,
Anthropology Department, University of Arizona, 1994.

17

El Paso, to Tucson, to Los Angeles and back. Mexican American youth in Los
Angeles during the 1930s were similarly influenced by the local demographics.
Pachuco culture in Los Angeles during the early 1940s was heavily influenced by
African American Jazz culture, and this manifested itself in their style of dress and
version of calo which was more English than Spanish.
15
In contrast, pachucos in El
Paso were more influenced by Mexicans than African Americans, whereas pachucos
in Tucson had unique Native American influences.
When the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots culminated in 1943, it
gave Los Angeles the reputation for being THE place where pachucos were located,
as well as the form of pachuco culture which was considered the most genuine,
violent, organized, and developed. L.A.’s version of pachuco culture also became
the definition of what the word pachuco meant to future generations’ understanding
of the cultural manifestation instead of the locally constructed versions this
dissertation aims to illustrate. After 1943, the zoot suit declined in popularity in Los
Angeles among Mexican Americans youth in general, but it was still used in varied
forms by Los Angeles’ Mexican American juvenile delinquents. The Los Angeles
version of pachuco culture was also increasingly popularized in other parts of the
Southwest among Mexican American youth in general, not just juvenile delinquents
although the style did carry such connotation. The culture was spread across the
U.S. Southwest by musicians from Tucson and El Paso who had moved to Los
Angeles (Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero) during the early 1940s. The popularization

15
Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 99.

18

of the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture in Tucson, El Paso and urban Mexico
make up the subjects of the final chapters. These places where pachuco culture was
re-popularized experienced the coexistence of their former versions of pachuco
culture, with that which came from the Los Angeles version. In El Paso, for
example, pachucos that came from Los Angeles were referred to as kalifas, not
pachucos. In fact, El Paso had a version of pachuco culture that was much more
developed than in Los Angeles; their versions of pachuco culture included
distinctions between the related cultural archetypes called tirilis, pachucos, kalifas,
and tarzanes.
THEORY
The cultural theory explaining pachuco culture in this dissertation is based on
the work of Stuart Hall, Elliot West, Paula Petrik, and William Tuttle. This
dissertation subscribes to Stuart Hall’s explanation of culture in that “meaning” is at
the core of understanding reality and significance in the past.
16
The following is a
concise attempt to explain this understanding of culture. While I, the author, and
you, the reader, share a culture unconsciously, heavily influenced by Western
tradition that allows us to take for granted how we communicate and understand
knowledge, all other cultures we can name are subcultures. These subcultures will
be referred to as cultures in this dissertation since the culture we all share goes
unnamed.

16
Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Edited by Stuart
Hall. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publication, 1997.

19

Before I begin using easily ambiguous terms such as culture, popular culture,
and mass culture freely, it is necessary to briefly define what is meant when I use
these terms. Culture, refers to a facet of, or an influence in, a lifestyle and usually
pertains to social status, economic status, life-affecting decisions, or interests.
Examples of culture include: middle class, rural, and Protestant. Popular culture is
more complex because it often refers to the compilation of dominant cultures and is
therefore synonymous with the term mainstream. In my usage, however, the term
popular culture will more closely refer to common knowledge and practices of
groups that are large in number. In the former definition of popular culture, White,
middle-class, male, and Protestantism make up the social and economic status part of
the mainstream. The life-affecting decisions and interests of what makes up the
mainstream are how they subscribe to things such as: democratic ideals, rock ‘n’ roll
music, and bacon and egg breakfasts. Mass culture is a means by which particular
types of culture are disseminated, such as through the production and dissemination
of records, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and comic books.
The concept of “culture” in this dissertation is heavily influenced by the
introduction to Small Worlds by Elliot West and Paula Petrik, as well as Daddy’s
Gone to War by William M. Tuttle which deals with the historical experiences of
children throughout the U.S. during the 1940s.
17
In their discussion of cultural and
regional variations, they acknowledge the important assumptions that can easily be

17
Tuttle, William M. Daddy's Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of Children. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993. West, Elliot and Paula Petrik. Small Worlds: Children and
Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

20

made when a portrayal of “typical” American children is attempted. They provide
the following short list of backgrounds and settings to help illustrate their
understanding:
Anglo-American Urban New England
Native American Suburban Mid-Atlantic
African American Small Town Midwest
Hispanic Rural South
Irish Plains
Italian Mountain West
Polish Southwest
Chinese Pacific Coast
18

From this short list of possibilities alone, 256 variations are possible and each
element in the list is a culture in itself and a facet of what makes up an individual’s
culture. Based on West and Petrik’s example, my list below can help illustrate some
of the different cultures that surround us.
Nation: United States, Mexico, Brazil, Belize, Haiti, Egypt, Afghanistan
Region: New England, Texas, Southern California, Colorado, the South
Class: millionaire, rich, middle class, working class, poor, homeless
Religion: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Confucianism
Age: newborn, toddler, child, teen, adult, middle aged, senior citizen
Gender: Male, Female, Trans-gendered
Race: Asian, Black, Latino, Native American, White, Multi-racial
Time Period: 1492, 1776, 1865, 1920, 1943, 1969, 2003
Types: punk, gangster, rocker

18
Elliot West and Paula Petrik. Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850 - 1950.
University Press of Kansas 1992. 11.

21

Occupation: fisherman, firefighter, priest, construction worker
With an understanding of culture as having to do with lifestyle in the form of daily
life practices, each of the previous categories can be a culture of its own. Each of
these cultures has a set of ideas and/or practices associated with it even if no person
ever fits the ideal exactly. For example, we may have an idea of what the ideal
Christian lives like, or a firefighter lives like, or a boy, or a Native American. No
person is subject to only one of these cultures, so a person may be simultaneously a
male, teen, Christian, white, gangster, from the South. All the different categories
compete with each other in their influence of the person. If the person has a choice,
then it is up to the person to decide which category defines and influences her/his
lifestyle and identity the most. The “decision” is not necessarily consciously or
explicitly made.
Pachuco culture is one of these categories. None of the categories are
necessarily permanent and life-long. Though uncommon, it is possible to identify as
a Christian from New England as a teenager, and become an atheist from the
Southwest within a few years. Ultimately, a child’s culture can be explained
depending on the multiple cultural circumstances a child has relationships with. For
example, a child is simultaneously culturally influenced by the religion she/he was
raised in, the region of the country she/he grew up in, and the education level of the
individual and parents.

22

While West and Petrik’s theories are useful for my purposes, I add to their
theory additional levels of analysis to make the reader’s understanding of culture
more in-depth.
1) Individuals determine their own cultural identity by “choosing” from among the
cultural options available, I sometimes refer to these as cultural precursors.
2) An individuals’ cultural preferences can change over the course of time, but can
also vary depending on the context or company within the same time period. Most
cultural symbols are not mutually exclusive, so individuals rarely have to choose a
single cultural identity at the exclusion of others.
3) All cultural influences are not equal. Some can be heavily encouraged by parents,
while others can be either reinforced or discouraged by the society the child has
contact with. Schools, churches, print media, radio, and television are all examples
of societal influences.
4) Culture is dynamic and evolving, yet the continuation of some cultural
characteristics allows them to continue as distinct despite change over time. The
continuation, or maintenance, of some aspects is what allows for the name or
definition of a culture to persist. An example of this may be “cowboys.” In some
time and place, say 1890s in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a cowboy was
associated with a particular race, riding a horse, and working on a farm among other
characteristics. “Cowboys” still exist in Texas during the twenty-first century, and
they still maintain associations with the characteristics of the nineteenth century
definition of a cowboy, but a modern cowboy need not fulfill any of the facets

23

mentioned from 1890 to be defined as one. A cowboy in 2009 could be someone
who performs country music and dresses the part. This example accounts for both
drastic, dynamic, and evolving change in a culture; as well as the continuation of the
culture in name and definition as distinct from other cultures.
5) In practice, cultures are rarely explicitly and comprehensively defined. Instead
they are comprised of a series of associations. This facilitates both regional and
temporal variations of the same culture, and its continuity despite these differences.
6) Occasionally a new culture is created, but even then it is by taking the symbols
that are already available from cultural precursors, putting them together in a new
way, and labeling the new configuration of symbols with a name. The name itself
may have also been taken from the words available and not completely new. This is
the case with the origins of pachuco culture.
7) This dissertation introduces the notion of competing hierarchies. This means that
some cultures encourage values that are different from the mainstream, capitalist-
driven, hetero-normative values that the most popular cultures espouse. For
example, while in mainstream society the greatest status is given to the individual
with the highest income, the most attractive physique, or the most education; in other
cultures such as criminal ones, the greatest status would be attributed to the person
with the longest criminal record, the most impressive fighting experience, or the
most quick-witted verbal retorts. This is not to say that all cultures are revolutionary
and run counter to the mainstream. What I argue is that each culture has its own
“ideal,” its own set of status symbols, its own continuum or hierarchy, and these

24

values are sometimes complimentary and sometimes in contradiction or competition
with each other.
These seven tenets make up the theoretical foundation upon which this
dissertation rests. Yet it may still not be clear to the reader what a pachuco or
pachuca is. It will take the entirety of this dissertation to extrapolate the full
meaning of these two terms. For the sake of clarity, however, the following short
definitions are offered. The best known understanding (i.e. definition) of pachucos is
the result of the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. By this definition, pachucos
were Mexican American youth who wore zoot suits. Pachucas, the female
counterparts, were the women associated with pachucos who dressed less uniformly
but were known to dress provocatively and do their hair in the pompadour style. The
body of this dissertation will define pachuco culture in ways that are less static and
essentialized, as well as more historical and multi-faceted. In short, pachuco culture
as defined in this dissertation will not be reduced to a single fashion style, city, or
brief historical moment.
The following are the types of questions answered in this dissertation. Were
pachucos deserving of the term if they did not wear a zoot suit or were not Mexican
American? What if they had no criminal involvement? Was one a pachuco or
pachuca if one only occasionally participated in activities associated with pachuco
culture? It has become clear that non-experts will often confuse pachucos with the
gang member cholos of the late 20
th
century, or with the wearing of the zoot suit
alone. Regarding the former, pachucos created a small number of the first Mexican

25

American gangs that modern cholos belong to, but most pachuco gangs of the 1940s
were nowhere near as sinister, criminal or deadly as their modern counterparts.
According to the oral history of El Paso Texas, Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua
Mexico, and Tucson Arizona, there were pachucos before and after the zoot suit was
in style, so the zoot suit was not a requirement to being a pachuco. As explained
earlier, “identity” is chosen by the individual from the list of identities available to
him or her. Many may have participated in one or more aspects of pachuco culture
without self identifying as such. For example, some individuals who refrained from
identifying as pachucos spoke some calo, had pachuco friends and/or regularly wore
some component of the zoot suit (baggy pants, long coat, or a chain hanging from
pants). Despite the previous statement, individual participants of pachuco culture are
occasionally referred to as pachucos in this dissertation, even if all the people I am
referring to did not primarily, nor indefinitely, identify as such. Following the
explanation of culture as having an “ideal” ideology and practice, pachucos shared a
language, ideology, and practices that predated and outlasted the zoot suit itself. The
distinction also has to be made between identity and labels. Identity is the term(s)
that individuals use to describe who they are. Labels are terms used to describe
groups of people. Whenever an academic uses a label, especially in aggregate terms,
it is not necessarily the primary term a person would use to self-identify.
When the author utilizes the singular term “pachuco” or the plural form
“pachucos” without any specific reference to gender, the term is referring to both
male and female participants of pachuco culture. This practice is in congruence with

26

how the term is used in Spanish, its language of origin. Similarly, the use of the
phrase “pachuco culture” or the Spanish term pachuquismo refers to the practices
and symbols associated with male and female participants. When “pachuco” or
“pachucos” is used with a male reference, it refers to males exclusively. When
“pachuca” or “pachucas” is used in this dissertation they refer to female participants
exclusively even if no other gendered reference is included in the sentence.
When referring to “Mexicans,” this dissertation is making reference to people
born in the country of Mexico. “Mexican Americans” is used to refer to Americans
of Mexican descent regardless of generation. “Ethnic Mexicans” is used to refer to
both Mexican Americans and Mexicans simultaneously. There is evidence of some
pachucos using the term “Chicano,” at a time when Mexican Americans did not yet
commonly use the term to refer to themselves, but pachucos used the term in a
manner that was different from the post-Chicano Movement definition of the term.
The first chapter “A History of Pachuco History and Knowledge” delineates
the historiography of work that addresses pachucos but its major contributions are
both the emphasis on the youth and the inclusion of non-academic works such as
music, literature, and films as helping to create a popular understanding of pachuco
culture. Since the entire chapter is dedicated to historiography, this introduction
presents only the major and most recent historiographic interventions of my
scholarship. The dissertation is divided into two temporal halves, the first addresses
that which occurred up to the two watershed events during World War II in Los

27

Angeles. The second half addresses the diaspora of the culture after 1943, primarily
throughout the United States Southwest, but also urban Mexico to a lesser degree.
The second chapter “El Paso, Juarez, and The Great Migration” investigates
the feasibility of the predominant, but under-researched, theory that pachuco culture
originated in the El Paso and Ciudad Juarez border towns and made its way to Los
Angeles via the Southern Pacific Railroad. Researching this theory is important in
order to understand pachuco culture, immigrant-American youth cultures, and the
relevance of borderlands culture to that of urban areas further from the border. This
dissertation posits the cultural theory that even “new” cultures are made from taking
aspects of previously existing cultures. Hence, the significance of musical,
fashionable, and linguistic cultural precursors that this dissertation argues were
clearly present in these sister cities during the early twentieth century. The tirilis of
the 1930s are the most relevant cultural precursors of all. One major contribution of
this chapter is that it adds insight to the general study of the Mexican American
Generation of the 1940s by emphasizing parallels experienced by a generational
precursor in El Paso, Texas during the 1910s.
Chapter 3 “Mexican and Native American Tucson” introduces both a new
site of study for modern history on the topic, and the contribution of a new ethnic
group to the culture. The participation of Native American Yaquis and their
contribution to pachuco culture are a major theme of this chapter. This chapter also
reveals the negotiation of identity for ethnic Mexican subgroups. Mexican Indians,
rural immigrants, middle class professionals, and members from these groups from

28

different generations interacted with each other and constructed their identities in
relationship to each other. One reason this is important is because it demonstrates
the richness, complexity, and fluidity of identity.
The second part of the dissertation addresses the influence of the Riots and
Sleepy Lagoon Case on the culture in some of the places pachuco culture had been
derived from before it arrived to Los Angeles. Where as Part One of the dissertation
focuses on the spread of pachuco culture through the movement of people; Part
TWO pays greater attention to the mass production of music and film, as well as the
dissemination of these products through records, radio, jukeboxes, and theatres. The
fourth chapter continues the focus on Tucson and its indigenous, primarily Yaqui,
participation and influence. The most significant untapped primary source on the
topic is also analyzed in this chapter. It is the source for the vignette that opened this
introduction. My work is the first scholarship to make use of the mid-1940s audio
recordings conducted by the cultural anthropologist George C. Barker. The
recordings consist of approximately a one hour recording of two pachucos
demonstrating their ability to speak their dialect of pachuco calo, singing songs and
having a conversation. Half of the recording consists of the two pachucos recounting
twenty stories in pachuco calo. The rest of the recording includes a discussion of
pachuco calo and pachuco versions of Mexican folk songs called corridos. The
richness of this primary source recorded in 1947, instead of interviews conducted
half a century later by other scholars on the topic, is dramatic. The recordings reveal

29

much about pachuco cultural ideals of gender, consumerism, language, music and
leisure.
“Pachucos in El Paso, Juarez, and Mexico” the final chapter continues with
the theme of the spread of pachuco culture after 1943 throughout the U.S. Southwest
and major urban centers in Mexico. The concluding chapter completes the history of
pachuco culture from the 1920s to the 1950s and serves as an important foundation
for understanding the Mexican American cultural manifestations of later decades
such as lowrider culture, vato loco/cholo culture, and Chicanismo.
This dissertation is unconventional in that it begins chronologically prior to
the 1940s and that it does not focus on Los Angeles during the Zoot Suit Riots. The
first chapter is a cultural historiography which explains how it came to be that any of
us know about this marginalized group to begin with. One goal of the following
chapter is to reconcile the relationship between what is known most about pachucos
(i.e. Zoot Suit Riots) and the focus of this dissertation which is the diffusion,
evolution, and ideology of the pachuco culture throughout the U.S. Southwest and
urban Mexico. Or as Crow, the author of the beginning vignette would put it, we are
going from “la Tus” (Tucson), to “el Chuco” (El Paso) and “Juarilez” (Ciudad
Juarez).

30

CHAPTER 1: A HISTORY OF PACHUCO HISTORY & KNOWLEDGE

The historiography of pachucos deals with the full scope of pachuco culture
only marginally since most scholarship has focused on the Zoot Suit Riots, the
Sleepy Lagoon Case, and Los Angeles. One common form of historiography is a
summary of how a topic has been written about at different points in history.
Traditional academic historiographies address academic works exclusively, but this
chapter will attempt to do something different. I call this an ideological
historiography because it takes into account non-Historical and non-academic
sources since they too can influence both the public memory of, and the academic
conversation regarding, a topic over time. The idea of an ideological historiography
of pachuco culture employed in this chapter was inspired by a paper presented by the
cultural anthropologist Jose Limon entitled “Discursive Odyssey of the ‘Ballad of
Gregorio Cortez.”
19
In this paper, Limon took non-academic works, such as popular
music and theatrical plays as serious purveyors of history and historical memory.
The ideological historiography in this chapter also takes into account the circulation
and audiences of various sources to gauge which sources had a greater impact to the
historical memory of various audiences regarding their understanding of pachucos
and their culture.

19
Jose Limon "Sounding it Back to the People: The Discursive Odyssey of ‘The Ballad of Gregorio
Cortez’ from Folk-Song through Ecriture to Polka Sound" Conference on Sounding the Differences:
Music and the Politics of Identity in America and Beyond. University of California at Berkeley, Fall
1995.

31

In Limon’s “discursive odyssey” he demonstrated how knowledge of the
social bandit Gregorio Cortez was relayed and spread throughout the 20
th
century.
Cortez was first popularized through word of mouth, newspapers, and folk ballad
corridos which were a musical genre popular among the Mexican American working
classes. The corrido of Gregorio Cortez was passed along from the adult performers
of the corrido, to the children that lived at the time of the incident that made Cortez
infamous in the early 1900s. Americo Paredes, a child from that generation, was
then able to turn the corrido into an academic study and monograph when he grew
up. Knowledge of Cortez was then taken up by the Chicano generation of the 1960s
and 1970s (such as Moctezuma Esparza) who eventually took knowledge from the
book and adapted it into the film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) that reached
wide audiences. Finally, working class people among the masses found an affinity
with the protagonist in the movie and re-popularized the corrido by creating modern
conjunto versions of the Corrido de Gregorio Cortez in the 1990s.
In the case of Cortez, knowledge of the incident went from the newspapers
that initially reported Cortez was a fugitive of the law, to popular working class
music that got passed on as oral history, then as an academic book which was used
decades later as the basis for a film that re-popularized knowledge of Cortez and
inspired a working class conjunto band to turn it into popular modern music. In this
manner knowledge of Cortez was passed on from 1901 to 2001. As the example of
Cortez attests, academic sources were important, but only partially responsible for
the widespread knowledge of Cortez. While both sympathetic and unsympathetic

32

portrayals of Gregorio Cortez existed in 1901, the unsympathetic was dominant
because of newspaper accounts. By 2001, however, the sympathetic view became
dominant.
The ideological historiography of pachucos is similar to that of the social
bandit Gregorio Cortez. Non-academic sources such as newspapers, music,
theatrical plays and film played a crucial role in the history of how knowledge of
pachucos was passed on to proceeding generations. Were it not for the Zoot Suit
Riots of 1943 in Los Angeles, the general public may not have ever learned much
about pachucos at all. The Zoot Suit Riots brought pachucos to the attention of the
nation. In 1943, newspapers were the primary means of informing the nation about
pachucos. A year prior to the Riots, there was a crime committed in a Los Angeles
neighborhood that culminated in a court case now known as the Sleepy Lagoon
Case. Along with the newspaper articles of the Riots, this case’s court documents
make up the bulk of the evidence and primary sources scholars have used to
understand pachucos.
20
These sources skew our understanding of pachucos because
they were not sympathetic in the least to the youths they addressed. Even if they had
been sympathetic, they still would have been outsider opinions regarding pachucos.
Similarly to the “discursive odyssey” of Gregorio Cortez, newspaper accounts of the
Case and the Riots spread the dominant view of pachucos which was unsympathetic.

20
Mazón, Mauricio. The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1984.; Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits,
Race and Riot in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

33

As this chapter will demonstrate, however, sympathetic understandings of pachucos
reigned dominant by 2009.
This chapter is concerned with the spread of the knowledge about pachucos.
It identifies the principal sources which have helped shape the idea of what a
“pachuco” was from the 1920s until the 21
st
century as far as academics, the
mainstream population, and the general ethnic Mexican population was concerned.
This differs from the focus of the rest of the dissertation which focuses on how
pachuco culture originated in the El Paso and Ciudad Juarez border towns in the
1920s, and how it spread to Tucson, Los Angeles and the Southwest by the late
1940s, from the point of view of pachucos themselves. In short, this chapter is about
what others have thought about pachucos and how they came to learn about them,
while the rest of the chapters address the history of pachuco culture from its origins
until the 1950s from a pachuco perspective.
The academic and non academic sources relating to pachucos and their
culture from 1920 to 2009 are organized in this chapter into six chronological
periods. The works in the earliest period were produced between 1920 and 1941.
These sources were largely academic but subscribed to a view of Mexican American
youth in which they were to blame for their own misfortune, due to unsuccessful
assimilation. These sources had a minimal impact in the popular understanding of
pachucos because of their scant circulation limited to academic circles of the 1920s
and 1930s. The years of 1942 and 1943, which coincide with the Sleepy Lagoon
Case and the Zoot Suit Riots, make up the second period of sources on the topic.

34

This is the period in which the bulk of sources were produced which spread the
predominant and unsympathetic view with newspaper articles and court proceedings.
Community and academic reactions represented the sympathetic position, but theirs
held less sway than the unsympathetic view during the 1940s. Despite their
contrarian positions, both perspectives contributed toward defining pachucos for
most of the 20
th
century as associated with zoot suits, Los Angeles, and second
generation Mexican Americans. During the late 1940s and early 1950s there was a
continuation of the sympathetic positions, they were found in novels, music, and
academic studies. These were largely academic and community reactions to the
unsympathetic views portrayed by the newspapers in 1942 and 1943. For most of
the 1950s and 1960s, there was very little produced on the topic. Both the
sympathetic and unsympathetic perspectives of pachucos continued during this
period. Both views continued to share the 1943 associations of pachucos with zoot
suits, Los Angeles, and second generation Mexican Americans. There was a
resurgence of interest in pachucos from the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s
until the early 1980s. The sources during this fifth period included academic works,
literature, art, plays and films. During this period the pachuco was reinterpreted as a
Chicano, meaning that HE was representative of the victimization of the Mexican
American population and an example of proud Chicanos fighting against Anglo
authorities to retain their Mexican American culture. While the sympathetic view of
pachucos was dominant over the unsympathetic position by 1970, a new minority
position arose during the 1970s which protested the absence of women and/or their

35

unsympathetic portrayal in sympathetic accounts of pachucos. The sixth and final
period, from the mid 1980s until the completion of this dissertation in 2009, made
great gains in the study of pachucos including; the first full-length published
monograph on the subject, the inclusion of other ethnic and racial groups into the
analysis, and a more comprehensive understanding of pachucos and pachucas that
goes beyond Los Angeles during World War II. Sympathetic interpretations of
pachucos, in both academic and popular circles, are now dominant in 2009. The
inclusion of women in popular understandings of pachuco culture are not yet
dominant, but their inclusion in significant ways are certainly at the cutting edge of
academic studies.
Prior to the Zoot Suit Riots some scholarly attention had been paid to the
ethnic Mexican community in Los Angeles and its pachucos. Five studies addressed
Mexican American youth between 1920 and 1942 and they all came from the
University of Southern California’s Sociology Department, but none did much to
help us understand pachucos and their culture. One of them, written by Alice Bessie
Culp in 1921 as a Masters thesis, focused on 35 L.A. Mexican Families with a
special emphasis on youth.
21
Emory S. Bogardus wrote three of the studies, one was
a book that addressed urban youth problems, another generally addressed Mexicans
in the United States, and the third study, which did focus on “Second Generation

21
Alice Bessie Culp “A case Study of the Living Conditions of Thirty-Five Mexican Families of Los
Angeles with Special Reference to Mexican Children” M.A. Thesis, University of Southern
California, Department of Sociology. 1921

36

Mexicans,” was only an eight page journal article.
22
The last of the studies written
prior to the Riots was jointly written by C. Shaw and R. Mc Kay in 1942 which also
had a general focus by addressing “Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas.”
23

Unfortunately, these articles are not very useful to understanding pachuco
culture. Those written in the 1920s are tainted with the prejudices that dominated
their times. The 1920s was a decade of Americanization programs in which
minorities’ below par living conditions were explained as products of minorities’
inability to Americanize. Later works were just as flawed because they were written
from a pathology-social scientist-Chicago School point of view which was
ethnocentric and unsympathetic of ethnic Mexicans in general. More importantly,
these authors’ arguments were based more on their preconceived notions than on the
empirical conclusions they espoused. Additionally, these sources alone would have
left knowledge of pachucos inconsequential. The circulation of these works was
narrow and limited to academic sociological circles. Its impact to the overall
knowledge of pachucos was minimal although they were the first signs of interest in
learning about the Mexican American generation and pachucos. Undoubtedly, the
first to write about pachucos explicitly were not these early academic works, but the
local Los Angeles newspapers.
Newspaper coverage of pachucos is best explained when separated into three

22
Emory S. Bogardus The City Boy and His problems. 1926; “Second Generation Mexicans”
Sociology and Social Research, 276-83. 1929; The Mexican in the United States. USC Social
Science Series, no8. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press. 1934

23
C. Shaw and R. McKay Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas Chicago. University of Chicago
Press. 1942.

37

phases. First they gave the public the impression of a pachuco crime wave that
police authorities were ineffective in curtailing (Spring 1942-Spring 1943). The
information regarding pachucos that was spread during this phase encouraged an
interpretation of pachucos as threats to public safety. When the riots started on June
3, 1943 the local newspapers with the greatest circulation immediately demonstrated
their approval of servicemen’s attacks on Mexican American youth which only
elicited more days of rioting and greater participation from both servicemen and
civilians against pachucos (June 3-13, 1943). During this second phase of
newspaper coverage they distributed information about pachucos that implicitly
labeled them an internal enemy and a prospective target for vigilante justice. By the
latter days of rioting several entities blamed the newspapers and local politicians for
the riot’s duration of 11 days. This is when newspapers increasingly printed articles
with a different tone that sought an image of journalistic objectivity and gave some
voice to the Mexican American community. This third period of newspaper
coverage spread information distinguishing their harsh sentiments for pachucos from
their allegedly affectionate feelings toward the ethnic Mexican population in general.
The object of this was to prove that the newspaper staff and local Los Angeles
authorities were not racists.
Beginning in the spring of 1942, several Los Angeles newspapers, in
particular the Los Angeles Examiner, and the Los Angeles Herald and Express,
began to publish stories of a Mexican American youth gang crime wave. Navy
officers estimated the number of brawls to have exceeded 50 between January and

38

June of 1943 alone.
24
According to Los Angeles newspapers, from the winter of
1942 to the outbreak of the Riots in the summer of 1943, there were increased
numbers of fights between pachucos and Anglo servicemen.
25
Mauricio Mazón,
author of The Zoot-Suit Riots sheds light on the issue by explaining that there was an
increase in serviceman-civilian confrontations that were misrepresented by the
newspapers as pachuco-servicemen confrontations.
26
Fortunately, not all Angelenos
were fooled by these media portrayals. The Citizen’s Committee for the Defense of
Mexican-American Youth (CCDMAY) published a pamphlet in 1943 which stated it
was not by accident that the alleged crime wave happened to coincide with the
arrival of U.S. government contracted Mexican agricultural workers, better known as
Braceros.
27
Unfortunately for pachucos and their peers, the newspaper’s accounts of
pachucos as threats to be feared and despised drowned out the voices of community
activists. It is significant to note that the interpretation that the newspaper’s
fabricated crime wave caused the Zoot Suit Riots prevailed from 1943 until 2003
when Eduardo O. Pagan introduced other significant contributing factors which are
addressed in detail later in this chapter.
28

24
New York Times. June 11, 1943, 21.

25
Mauricio Mazón The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1984.

26
Mazón,

27
Citizen’s Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth, “The Sleepy Lagoon Case,” a
booklet in Mexican Americans and the Law, New York: Arno Press, 1974.

28
Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

39

After fabricating a pachuco crime wave, the newspapers covered the Zoot
Suit Riots they helped instigate, here begins the second phase of newspaper
coverage. The narrative they portrayed at the local and national level was the
following. The spark that set off the explosion of riots occurred on the Thursday
evening of June 3, 1943. A group of sailors had gone into an L.A. barrio looking for
girls. During their visit to the barrio, the sailors fought with some local pachucos in
a confrontation. The sailors returned on Friday night with reinforcements. Two-
hundred sailors attacked any zoot suiter in sight as they roamed the East side district
of Los Angeles. By 10 p.m. that evening, a general riot alarm was ordered by Chief
of Police C. B. Horrall, and 300 police and deputy police were put on patrol for the
weekend.
29
The Navy’s initial response to the sailors’ actions in Los Angeles was
that the servicemen had acted in “self-defense” against the “rowdy elements.”
30
The
sailors claimed that they were tired of being “shoved around,” and that in many
cases, their girlfriends had been insulted.
The rioting continued over the weekend and climaxed on Monday June 7,
1943, when the number of servicemen rioting had escalated to thousands. More than
fifty zoot suiters were stripped of their clothing as servicemen and civilians searched
the bars, restaurants, penny arcades and stores in the downtown area. These same
fifty arrested zoot suiters were later released from jail without charges according to

29
Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1943. 1.

30
New York Times, June 9, 1943. 23.

40

both the Mexican consul and City Councilman Thrasher.
31
Nearly 500 servicemen
were taken into custody, but most were sent back to their stations the next morning.
32

Similar confrontations persisted for ten days after the onset of brawling.
Though the Riots are generally remembered as something that occurred in Los
Angeles exclusively, the newspapers did acknowledge that by Wednesday, with
more scrutinized security in downtown and East L.A., the clashes had spread
geographically to other cities across Southern California. Despite serious eruptions
north and east of Los Angeles city boundaries in places like Pasadena and Azusa,
most of the rioting spread south into places like Watts, Santa Ana, and even as far
south as San Diego. Scholarship has expanded its analysis even further from
Southern California, such as Harvard Sitkoff’s 1971 study of race riots across the
United States that same summer of 1943, to the parallel experiences of African
American zoot suiters in Los Angeles and New York by Luis Alvarez in 2008.
33

After the alleged crime wave and riot coverage, newspapers like the Los
Angeles Times reacted to accusations that they had catalyzed hatred for pachucos
through their coverage of the crime wave and the riots. This third phase of
newspaper coverage goes contrary to the belief that newspaper coverage of the Riots
was exclusively anti-pachuco, a perspective that prevailed in scholarship and non

31
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1943. A.

32
Ibid., June 9, 1943, 1.

33
Sitkoff, Harvard. "Racial Militancy and Racial Violence in the Second World War." Journal of
American History 58, no. 3 (1971): 661-81; Alvarez, Luis The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and
Resistance during World War II. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008

41

academic sources until Pagan’s monograph in 2003.
34
On June 10
th
, for example, the
Los Angeles Times printed an article stating that a delegation composed of
representatives from the C.I.O, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Latin
American Youth, called on U.S. Attorney Charles H. Carr to prosecute police,
sheriffs, and military leaders for being “conspirators” that wanted to give zoot-suiters
a “good pushing around.”
35

The Los Angeles Times also printed the findings from an investigation done
by State Attorney General Robert Kenny and his committee of five people that
attempted to determine how factual the pachuco crime wave actually was. Kenny’s
findings stated that the number of court cases involving “Mexican boys” (928 cases)
for the previous year, was actually a slight drop in court cases from 1941. In
contrast, among “white boys” there was an increase of 1.4% to the 2,408 cases they
were involved with in 1941. While there was no drastic drop in court cases among
Mexican juveniles, and no extreme proportional increase among white juvenile
cases, the evidence still supports the view of a press fabricated crime wave.
36
While
information that favored pachucos or countered the accusations made against them,
were not non-existent, it is also true that the pro-pachuco information which was
found in the text in the middle of the paper and in the middle of articles, was no
match for the misinformation that was spread by dozens of headlines.

34
Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

35
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1943, A.

36
New York Times, June 11, 1943, 21.

42

Mexican government authorities and local activists blamed local politicians
and the sensationalism of the newspapers for instigating the Riots and their
escalation. Local authorities reacted to accusations and the L.A. Times provided the
politicians with a platform to voice their defense. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher
Bowron was quick to deny to State Officials in Washington that any racial
discrimination was occurring.
37
Rafael de la Colina, the Minister-Counselor of the
Mexican Embassy in Washington hinted that a formal protest from the Mexican
Government was possible. Upon knowledge of the Mexican Consul’s reports, Earl
Warren, the California Governor, recognized that the Riots had taken on the status of
an international incident so he ordered State Attorney General Robert Kenny to
investigate the incidents along with a committee.
38

One of the ways local authorities reacted was by deflecting blame to the
U.S.’s World War II enemy, the Axis. They claimed the riots were caused, not by
local discrimination, but by Axis agents who infiltrated Mexican American
neighborhoods and would focus on corrupting susceptible Mexican American youth.
As evidence of this, the Los Angeles Times reported on Reverend Francisco
Quintanilla, a Pastor of the Mexican Methodist Church and “the little mayor of
Watts,” who was quoted saying that a white man with a broken English accent had
approached the youth he worked with. Quintanilla strongly believed this man was an
enemy agent and he was quoted saying “one of my own boys in my church told me

37
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1943. A.

38
Ibid.

43

... propagandists urge our Mexican youth to commit crimes, to build up police
records so that they will not be accepted by the armed forces.”
39
While this type of
news was palpable to readers in the context of War, stories like these did not have a
significant impact in the way the Zoot Suit Riots nor pachucos were understood or
remembered.
Local authorities and the newspapers argued that claiming discrimination and
racism as root causes of the riots was akin to helping the Axis achieve its goals.
They reminded the public that not only were Axis agents creating pachuco
delinquency, but that the riots and claims about the role of racism and discrimination
could be used as propaganda to cause discord between the Allies. Before the Riots
were completely extinguished, The Los Angeles Times was already warning the
public not to make claims about racism and discrimination because the Riots could
be used for Axis propaganda and reminded the public that the Los Angeles Sleepy
Lagoon court case verdict, just five months prior, had been used as Axis propaganda
in Latin America. The following is an example distributed on June 11, 1943 to
demonstrate what the Axis had done with knowledge of the Sleepy Lagoon verdict,
“On January 13th [1943] the Axis radio beamed to Latin America carried (sic) the
following message in Spanish:”

39
Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1943. A.

44

In Los Angeles, California, the so-called “City of Angels,” twelve Mexican boys
were found guilty today of a single murder and five others were convicted of assault
growing out of the same case. The 360,000 Mexicans of Los Angeles are reported
up in arms over this Yankee persecution. The concentration camps [jails] of Los
Angeles are said to be overflowing with members of this persecuted minority. This
is justice for you, as practiced by the ‘Good Neighbor’ Uncle Sam, a justice that
demands seventeen victims for one crime.
40

The fear was that the Axis could use knowledge of the Zoot Suit Riots in the same
manner. The article below also expresses the palpability of Axis danger. It was
composed by a respondent to the Opinion section of the L.A. Times which urged
authorities to take
the strongest measures ... to prevent any further outbreaks of ‘zoot suit rioting.
While members of the armed forces received considerable provocation at the hands
of unidentified miscreants ... It would not do, for a large number of reasons, to let
the impression be circulated in South America that persons of Spanish American
ancestry were being singled out for mistreatment in Southern California. There was
no anti-racial action ... but some of the occurrences could form a basis for Axis
propaganda if sufficiently distorted. ...The Police Department has the paramount
duty ... of making Southern California safe for servicemen ...
41

Interestingly enough, this author was conscious of, and concerned with, the
circulation of impressions regarding pachucos. On the same note, Jack B. Tenney,
State Senator, and member of the fact finding committee on un-American activities
initially stated he had found evidence that the demonstrations were Axis sponsored
after questioning only three suspects in County Jail.
42
Newspapers later
acknowledged that all investigations had determined there was no connection
whatsoever between the Axis and any pachucos. Ultimately, newspaper sources did

40
Citizen’s Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth.

41
Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1943. 4.

42
Ibid., June 10, 1943, A.

45

little to inform us about pachuco culture but they did demonstrate what non
pachucos, and the general reading public, thought about them and what information
was being spread about them.
The most important impact of newspaper coverage of the Riots is that they
helped define what a pachuco was for the remainder of the 20
th
century. Whereas
there was no consensus about what a pachuco was before the Riots, the
misinformation from the newspapers helped define what “pachucos” were. This will
be discussed further in other chapters of this dissertation. In short, in early 1942 Los
Angeles there was no consensus about what a pachuco was. There were youth from
El Paso in L.A. that spoke the pachuco caló dialect and were heavily culturally
influenced by Mexico and the border region around Ciudad Juarez. Simultaneously
there were also local Mexican American youth who were much more influenced by
African American culture and spoke more jive than caló. Newspaper coverage of the
Riots introduced knowledge of pachucos to the nation as a whole and therefore
heavily shaped the concept of what a pachuco was for most Anglos and even some
ethnic Mexicans who were not in touch with working class youth culture such as
non-teens and the middle class. Similarly, pachuco culture developed into various
cultural forms after the 1940s, yet the definition of pachucos in the popular
imagination remained the 1943 newspaper version from Los Angeles. This
definition of pachucos is limited to zoot suit wearing, Mexican American youth,
from Los Angeles. This impression of what a pachuco was, continues to be the
prevailing understanding of pachucos in 2009 as is evidenced by the overwhelming

46

majority of the historiography on the topic, which is addressed throughout this
chapter. Additionally, while the academic works which preceded newspaper
coverage of the Case and Riots initiated unsympathetic interpretations of ethnic
Mexican youth, it was the newspaper coverage of 1942 and 1943 which cemented
the unsympathetic views into the prevailing understanding of pachucos.
In addition to the newspaper articles written on pachucos and the riots, at
least five works addressing the Zoot Suit Riots were published that same year, three
of which were non-scholarly. They all directly contradict unsympathetic newspaper
accounts by arguing that pachucos were the result of discrimination toward Los
Angeles residents of Mexican descent. The first of these works was a pamphlet
published by the Citizen’s Committee for the Defense of Mexican American Youth
which was published soon after the guilty verdict of the 17 Sleepy Lagoon
defendants in January of 1943. This pamphlet partially focused on creating unity in
the U.S., but more centrally focused on gaining Anglo support for these victims of
racial discrimination in the justice system. Another related publication of that year
was by Chester B. Himes’ in the magazine Crises, in which he also argued against
city and state politicians by contending that the Zoot Suit Riots were race riots.
43

Another publication was an eight page report from the Joint Fact-Finding
Committee on Un-American Activities in California which concluded with demands
for immediate and long-term action after hearing testimony for two days behind
closed doors from city and police officials, representatives from “minority groups,”

43
Chester B. Himes “Zoot Riots Are Race Riots” Crises 50, no. 7 (July 1943).

47

and social welfare workers.
44
The findings of this committee ended up disproving
the impression that Mexican Americans, in general, were as unpatriotic as pachucos
were generally perceived to be. The types of actions the committee recommended
included: the punishment of all persons involved in the riots, that newspapers
minimize the use of names and photos of juveniles, and that better-educated and
trained police officers work with the youth. The fourth study was done by George I.
Sánchez and printed in Common Ground which focused on the “making” of
pachucos, unfortunately its length was only eight pages.
45

The most scholarly work about pachucos and the riots to be published in
1943 came out in September’s edition of “Sociology and Social Research,” however
its length was only 12 pages.
46
While these sources were sympathetic to pachucos
their limited circulation meant they were not enough to dispel general anti-pachuco
sentiment. It is of significance to note however, that while the prevailing sentiment
in 1943 was anti-pachuco, it was the sympathetic perspective of these little known
publications which eventually came to prevail as the principal understanding of the
Riots, pachucos, and the World War II home front with regards to how history is
taught in 2009. This is due to public opinion in 1943 carrying more influence
regarding the period than contemporary academic works. In 2009, historical

44
New York Times, June 13, 1943. 30,

45
George I. Sanchez “Pachucos in the Making.” Common Ground (fall of 1943) 13-20.

46
Emory S. Bogardus. “Gangs of Mexican-American Youth.” Sociology and Research 28
(September, 1943): 55-66.

48

interpretations about the 1940s carry more weight than public opinion regarding the
period because the public generally defers to historians regarding History.
It was not until five years after the Riots, and after the above mentioned
works were published, that a full-length and serious attempt to address pachucos and
their perspective of the riots was published. This fifth period, roughly from 1948 to
1954 makes up a distinct series of works on the topic. Beatrice Griffith wrote
American Me and published it in 1948 after being a social worker for several years.
47

It was in 1948 through Griffith’s book, that pachucos’ views became known to the
public for the first time. In some aspects, it is still one of the best books written on
pachucos. American Me gave voice to pachucos which had been muted in local and
national newspaper accounts. Griffith told the story of the least fortunate among the
Mexican working class of Los Angeles which are typically the least likely to have
their experiences told. This book also proved discrimination and its effects, a goal
which the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was trying to achieve since 1942. One
of the greatest advantages that Griffith had on all the scholarship that has been
written since is the fact that she decided to base her narrative on interviews she
conducted with pachucos instead of basing it on court documents, newspaper
accounts, police records, or impressions based on little contact with the subjects. In
Griffith’s explanation for the origin of pachucos, she asserted that they were the
products of poverty, domestic problems, and maladjustment to American culture
which were all byproducts of discrimination.

47
Beatrice Griffith. American Me. Riverside Press, 1948. Also “The Chicano Patois” Common
Ground, Vol 7, No. 4 (Summer 1947).

49

Some of the weaknesses of Griffith’s book result from the fact that more than
half of Griffith’s book is fictive and unaccountable since she did not cite her sources
consistently. She should have cited her interviewees using the pseudonyms she used
in the body of the chapters. Her scope is also limiting because in focusing on the
poorest Mexican families, like the newspapers, her book could have been
misunderstood to represent the entire Mexican community even though Griffith
never made that claim. Through her writing style, she also made many general
statements like “Mexicans are good for digging ditches and making rails lie down for
the trains, for picking fruits, and for going hungry ... when there’s not much work. I
think Mexicans are sad for living in a brown skin maybe, that’s why they’re crazy
sometimes.”
48
While my first impression was to discredit Griffith’s comments as
part of a degree of inevitable racism of her time, I have reassessed my position and
see Griffith’s work as easily misunderstood but insightful. Griffith took the effects
of racial discrimination seriously and made very perceptive comments that are
addressed later in this dissertation. While her monograph had limited circulation
during the 1940s and 1950s, it became one of the most influential sources to learn
about pachucos in the 1960s and 1970s. Then in 1992, a major motion picture was
released by the same name, American Me. The film is about Mexican American
prison gangs and opens with a scene from the Zoot Suit Riots to illustrate the
victimization that the Mexican American Generation of the 1940s had to contend
with.

48
Griffith, 67.

50

Two years after reading Griffith’s account of pachucos and the Mexican
lower classes of Los Angeles, George C. Barker published his own lengthy article
entitled Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in Tucson,
Arizona in 1950. Pachuco focused on the origins, structure, and young practitioners
of the Tucson Arizona pachuco dialect, which I refer to as pachuco caló. This article
is of particular interest for the study of pachuco culture because while Barker studied
pachuco language, attitudes, origins, and demographics he managed to both learn
from pachucos, as well as teach his contemporaries about them. Barker explained
that their language entered the U.S. through El Paso, which came from Mexico,
which in turn originated in caló that can be traced back to the gypsies in Spain.
49

Barker also provides a resource that scholarship since his study, have read, but have
neglected to utilize, his interviews with fifteen Mexican American teen-agers and
young men, all of which were either pachucos themselves or were closely acquainted
with someone who was. These interviews are instrumental for understanding various
aspects of pachuco culture such as, how Mexican American youth learned pachuco
calo, what they thought of the pachuco lifestyle, and what the pachuco lifestyle was.
This dissertation relies heavily on Barker’s publications as well as his unpublished
archival material. These interviewees reveal how important music was to learning
pachuco calo and how influential contacts with Los Angeles and El Paso were to
them. Griffith and Barker’s books make up some of the richest sources for
understanding the period most closely associated with pachucos because of the time

49
Barker, George Carpenter. "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in
Tucson, Arizona." Social science bulletin; no. 18; (1950): 21.

51

the articles were published and the fact that each book conducted more than a dozen
interviews with pachucos.
Musical production covering the period 1948-1954 helped re-popularize
pachuco culture throughout the Southwest and in some regards music tells us more
about pachuco culture than books. The two most popular musicians of pachuco
music were Lalo Guerrero from Tucson, Arizona and Don Tosti from El Paso,
Texas. Their music also predated the publications by Griffith and Barker which
demonstrates their impetus was independent of academic works.
50
As Barker’s
interviewees attested, music was influential for pachucos and made its way to
Barker’s study and publication. This is evidence of one of the ways in which music
affected academic work, not the other way around. The music by Guerrero and Tosti
was tremendously effective in spreading knowledge of pachuco culture to Mexican
American youth across the Southwest who participated in this culture. The music of
this period is addressed in more detail in the chapters addressing El Paso and Tucson
specifically.
In continuation of this period of 1948-1954, the literary sources also
contributed to mainstream knowledge of pachuco culture. Some advantages of
literature, as opposed to historical works, include unlimited imagination and the
potential to be quite accurate and hence, substitute for missing historical documents.
Before American Me was published (1948) and before Don Tosti was recording his

50
Mentes, Sherilyn Meece. Lalo: My Life and Music. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press,
2002. 191. “La Pachuquilla” was Guerrero’s first recorded pachuco song in 1946.

52

first pachuco songs, Mario Suarez wrote the short story “Kid Zopilote” in 1947.
51

While most of the sources discussed are sympathetic to pachucos and are specific to
Los Angeles, Suarez’ short story is not sympathetic and relates to Tucson, Arizona.
This work lends itself to complement Barker’s Pachuco (1950).
The plot in Kid Zopilote is about a Mexican American youth from Tucson
who visited Los Angeles and returned as a pachuco. The youth is ridiculed by his
peers and is temporarily cured of his pachuco tendencies and appearance as a result
of getting a haircut and his clothes “retailored” by local Tucson police. During this
time kid zopilote is “admired” by his Anglo neighbors but then resumes his pachuco
tendencies when his hair grows back to ducktail length. This short story serves as
evidence of the popular definition of pachucos in 1947, one with a strong association
to Los Angeles and the ducktail haircut.
Suarez’ perspective in contrast to Barker’s will be further explained in later
chapters. Suffice to say that at the time this short story was written the Los Angeles
definition of pachucos predominated in Tucson; hence, Suarez’s impression that the
Tucson youth became a pachuco as a result of having visited Los Angeles. The fact
that Suarez was concerned with the youth being “admired” by Anglos also lends
itself to my discussion of competing hierarchies. Suarez saw Anglo’s high regard as
a positive result, while “kid zopilote” did not value Anglo approval above

51
Beatrice Griffith. American Me Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948.; Mario Suarez, “Kid
Zopilote,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1947), pp. 130-137.; Arturo Madrid-Barela’s
“In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay” in Aztlan: Chicano Journal of the Social
Sciencies and the Arts. Vol 4, No. 1, Spring 1973 Aztlan Publications, University of California, Los
Angeles.

53

participating in pachuco culture. The Tucson pachuco held different values than
both Suarez and the Anglos in question since the pachuco subscribed to a cultural
ideal within pachuquismo that many could not understand. Suarez’ unsympathetic
portrayal is also representative of the ethnic Mexican middle class perspective of
pachuco culture during the 1940s and 1950s.
Despite some misogynistic aspects of pachuco culture, the study of pachucos
was not male dominated. Some of the foremost experts of pachuquismo in the late
1940s were women such as Alice McGrath who fought for the Sleepy Lagoon
Defense Committee, Beatrice Griffith a social worker and author of American Me,
and Cornelia Jessey who authored the novel Teach the Angry Spirit in 1949.
52
Jessey
was not very sympathetic to pachucos, but she was sympathetic toward Mexican
Americans in general. The book is about the fictional protagonist Angel Garcia and
his coming to terms with discrimination toward Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.
Angel’s sister Mercy was in denial about her Mexican identity. Her boyfriend,
Bernardo loved her but she preferred to run away with a white accountant. Jessey
argued that while “some [Mexicans] were bad, like the zoot-suiters and her cousin
Manuel …most were warm-hearted people.”
53
This plot however, was more than just
a fictional story since it was published in 1949 and was not very distant from Los
Angeles during the W.W. II years. The circulation of this work of literature is

52
Cornelia Jessey Teach the Angry Spirit New York: Crown, 1949.

53
Jessey, cover insert.

54

unknown but its impact to popular knowledge of pachuco culture was minimal since
it is not brought up nor referenced in future works.
The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of drought in regards to the
amount of academic writing on the subject. This is a period of its own, the fourth of
six, in order to distinguish these sources from those that came before and after with
different characteristics. For both decades there were only two master’s thesis and
one essay produced. The two master’s theses were never published and therefore
had scant readership beyond experts on the topic, but the essay was quoted often in
the 1980s and 1990s. In 1955, Marilyn Domer wrote her master’s thesis entitled
“The Zoot-Suit Riot: A Culmination of Tensions in Los Angeles” at the Claremont
Graduate School in Southern California. The second master’s thesis was written by
James Solomon Jones at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969 and it
made one of the first attempts to rename the riots more appropriately. He called
them “The Government Riots of Los Angeles June, 1943.”
The essay which has been cited often is Octavio Paz’s “The Pachuco and
Other Extremes” published in The Labyrinth of Solitude in 1961. In it, Paz asserts
that in the short time he lived in Los Angeles, he learned that pachucos were an
anomaly. From Paz’s point of view, pachucos did not want to be confused for
Mexicans nor Americans, and therefore they exaggerated and flaunted their
differences instead of desiring societal integration as African Americans did.
54
Paz
is cited often because he is one of the world’s foremost writers and because his

54
Paz, Octavio. "El Pachuco Y Otros Extremos." In The Labyrith of Solitude. New York: Grove
Press, 1961. 14.

55

general analysis of Mexican-United States relations was long considered superb. In
regards to his opinion of pachucos, however, historians have cited him mostly to
contrast Paz’s opinion to their own. Paz portrayed pachucos and Mexican
Americans as a monolithic entity, as a product of the attitudes that Mexicans in Los
Angeles have, “they feel ashamed of their origin” according to Paz.
For the early 1950s, the music recorded up to 1954 as well as some of the
academic sources and literary sources that made up a means for maintaining the idea
of pachucos alive has already been presented. The popularity of pachucos seems
scant from the mid-1950s up until the late 1960s. Pachuco culture did not disappear
after the 1940s, instead, it evolved into other cultural forms. The Sleepy Lagoon
Case and the Zoot Suit Riots popularized pachuquismo throughout the southwest in
the 1940s. Like pachuco music demonstrates, these incidents did not hinder the
popularity of pachuco culture, it flourished throughout the Southwest.
Pachucos in trouble with the law ended up dead or in prison. The Mexican
Mafia, a Mexican American prison gang, was started in the mid-1950s. Nuestra
Familia, a northern California version of the Mexican Mafia, was created in the
1960s. Pachuquismo flourished in prisons among prison gang members. Many
other pachucos, in search of employment and a hobby to keep them out of trouble,
turned toward auto body shops and mechanic work. Members from the infamous
38
th
Street gang, associated with the Sleepy Lagoon Case, for example, were known

56

to turn toward lowrider culture, as a productive offshoot of pachuquismo.
55
In their
own disparate manners, prison gangs and lowrider car clubs perpetuated the memory
of pachuquismo as well as evolved into new subcultures that maintained some
aspects of pachuco culture.
In contrast to the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were many works written
in the late 1960s and 1970s on pachucos and the Zoot Suit Riots. This is the fifth
period of cultural and academic works, the one in which pachucos were generally
romanticized as the first Chicanos to stand up to Anglo oppressors. A dissertation by
Ismael Dieppa looked at the Riots and the role of private philanthropy with Mexican
American youth in 1973. An article printed in the Chicano journal Aztlán, pondered
what constituted an “Authentic Pachuco.”
56
The following year, Patricia Rae Adler
published the chapter “The 1943 Zoot Suit Riot: Brief Episode in a Long Conflict.”
57

In 1977 there was one book published which focused on pachuco language and in
1978 a novel and an academic book were published.
58

55
Sandoval, Denise M. "Bajito Y Suavecito/Low and Slow: Cruising through Lowrider Culture."
Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University, 2003.; http://www.dukescarclub.com/pb/wp_860360ce/
wp_860360ce.html Accessed August 14, 2009; Bright, Brenda Jo. "Mexican American Low Riders:
An Anthropological Approach to Popular Culture." Rice University, 1994.

56
Ismael Dieppa. “The Zoot-Suit Riots Revisited: The Role of Private philanthropy in Youth
Problems of Mexican Americans” Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, and
Arturo Madrid-Barela’s “In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretative Essay.” Aztlan,
Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts 4, no1 (Spring 1973)

57
Patricia Rae Adler “The 1943 Zoot Suit Riot: Brief Episode in a Long Conflict.” in An Awakening
Minority: The Mexican Americans. 1974 Edited by Manuel P. Servin. Beverly Hills, California.

58
Adolfo Ortega, Calo Tapestry. Berkeley, California. 1977.; Joan W. Moore, “Homeboys, Gangs,
Drugs and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles” Philadelphia, 1978; and Thomas Sanchez, Zoot Suit
Murders. New York. 1978.

57

Although embraced by rebellious youth during the late 1940s and early
1950s, the pachuco was looked down upon by the larger Mexican American
population. In contrast, the pachuco was re-popularized during the Chicano
Movement. The movement was an opportunity to find pride in aspects of the
Mexican American community that were previously sources of shame, including
pachucos.
59
Javier Alva’s short story “The Sacred Spot” written in 1968 is
exemplary of what would be expected to emanate during the Chicano Movement.
60

The Sacred Spot is set during the Zoot Suit Riots in a fictional account of a Mexican
youth who shot a sailor in the head in revenge for what other sailors had done to his
peers and his service uniformed cousin.
Jose Montoya wrote a play called “Los Vatos” in 1969 and the poem “El
Louie” in 1970.
61
The play refers to the “vatos locos” of the 60s and 70s who had
evolved their vato loco culture from the pachuco culture of the 40s and 50s. “El
Louie” is about a young Mexican American pachuco from rural central California
who had all the similar fantasies of an inner-city pachuco. Montoya presented a
portrayal that sympathized with pachucos, yet revealed the ugliness and sadness of
barrio warfare and discrimination. The poem is useful in learning what is associated
with pachucos such as: the forties, the fifties, specific places, examples of

59
Floyd Salas, Tattoo the Wicked Cross, New York: Grove Press, 1968.

60
Javier Alva, “The Sacred Spot” Con Safos, Vol. 1 No. 3 (March 1969).

61
Madrid-Barela argues that El Louie was first published in Rascatripas Vol II (Oakland, CA) 1970.
Jose E. Limon in Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American
Social Poetry Berkeley University of California Press, 1992. He argues that “El Louie” was not
published until 1972.

58

nicknames, the military, irony, and sadness.
62
Montoya’s “El Louie” became one of
the most referenced sources regarding the topic during the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1972 Mario Suarez wrote another short story called “El Hoyo.”
63
By “el
hoyo,” Suarez referred to an ethnic Mexican neighborhood in Tucson Arizona during
the late 1940s. This illustrates one place that pachucos lived in outside Los Angeles.
Suarez also explained his theory, utilized in this work for other topics. Suarez
compared Chicanos to the Mexican dessert called capirotada. Capirotada is a dish
composed of somewhat random ingredients that result in a different flavor for each
family that makes it, yet everyone’s version of capirotada is still called capirotada.
Pachucos were differed in various barrios throughout the Southwest from 1935 to
1955, yet they were all still pachucos.
Like Jose Montoya, another poet of significance is Raul R. Salinas who wrote
“Trip through the Mind Jail” in 1969 and “Homenaje al Pachuco” in 1973.
64
“Trip
through the Mind Jail” is about a pachuco in prison, Salinas’ identity as a pachuco,
his memories about the barrio, and descriptions of Chicano graffiti. It is important to
note that Salinas was not an academic, nor a formal writer of fiction, he became a
poet while in a California state prison. “Homenaje al Pachuco” is a critique of

62
El Louie is discussed further by Jose Limon in Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems, by Renato
Rosaldo in Culture and Truth, by Madrid-Barela in Aztlan, and by Teresa McKenna in “An Utterance
More Pure Than Word': Gender and the Corrido Tradition in Two Contemporary Chicano Poems”
184-207 in Miller, Cristanne (ed. and introd.). Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory.
Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan, 1994.

63
Mario Suarez “El Hoyo” in Literatura Chicana: texto y Contexto edited by Antonia Castaneda
shular, Thomas ybarra-frauto and joseph summers. Prentice-Hall: New Jersey, 1972. 154.

64
Raul Salinas, quoted in Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto, 1969. 182-186.

59

academics who erroneously attempted to study pachucos in the past while, he
believed, real pachucos were still in prison at the time of his poems’ release (1973).
65

Salinas also critiqued the unnatural compartmentalization of pachucos by academia.
He expressed it as “pachucos as a social deviant, room one; pachucos and a hero,
room two; pachucos as a pachuco room three” in a parody of academia.
“Homenaje..” is evidence that Salinas was in conversation with academic sources on
the topic. Salinas’ poetry is also instrumental for understanding the evolution of
pachuco culture. Pachuco culture did not cease to exist in the early fifties, it evolved
into lowrider culture and vato loco culture (and eventually cholo culture), which is
what the evidence suggests, and what Salinas felt so adamant about in “Homenaje al
Pachuco.” This is a great example of how historical inquiry is informed by literary
production and how ideas progress through time at different social and educational
levels in a Limonesque fashion.
66

To Salinas, pachucos in the 1940s were no different than those of the late
1960s because like Suarez, capirotada is still capirotada no matter what the
ingredients or the taste. In contrast to Salinas’ view however, this dissertation argues
that pachuco culture was a strong influence in the 1940s and 1950s throughout the
Southwest. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, pachuco culture had evolved into
other cultural forms that still had remnants of pachuquismo but they were more of

65
Salinas “Homenaje al Pachuco” mirrored reflections [and other poems]. Sound Recording, Los
Angeles: Public Broadcasting, University of Southern California, 1974.

66
This is a reference to my notion of ideological historiography and the “discursive odyssey” by Jose
Limon addressed in the first page of this chapter.

60

the new than the old. Vato Loco culture from the street gangs and prisons, as well as
lowrider culture from the barrios, held on to notions of pachuquismo but the pachuco
in these cultures was but a subset of these new and prominent Mexican American
subcultures.
The 1970s rival the 1940s with the amount of pachuco themed academic
production which was surely due to the influence of the Chicano Movement. A few
master’s thesis and dissertations were completed. In regards to literary production it
is not as bulky but definitely important for the production after the 1970s. Luis
Valdez’ play Zoot Suit debuted in 1978 and was extremely successful in re-
popularizing pachucos. Alejandro Murguia wrote a book of short stories from 1970
to 1979 entitled Farewell to the Coast that was published in 1980. Two of the short
stories were about pachucos. One was about a Mexican immigrant who moved to
the San Fernando Valley during the 1940s and got into fights with pachucos. The
other story is about a pachuco during the 1950s and his fights with other pachucos.
This book did an excellent job of writing descriptively about those two decades,
albeit briefly.
While the title of Thomas Sanchez’ novel Zoot-Suit Murders, published in
1978, implied it may be more detailed and thorough about zoot-suiters than
Murguia’s short stories, it was not.
67
Instead, like much of the scholarship on
pachucos, the implication from the title is a focus on zoot suiters, while in reality
they end up focusing on something else, while leaving pachucos at the margins,

67
Thomas Sanchez, Zoot Suit Murders, New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1978, 1991.

61

again. Scholars deal with a scarcity of sources that hinders their ability to treat
pachucos extensively despite their best intentions. These scholars’ conclusion can be
promptly refuted for coming to minimally substantiated conclusions. Thomas
Sanchez’ Zoot Suit Murders is not historical scholarship, yet it is obvious he looked
at the written scholarship to inform his novel. Sanchez, unlike scholars, however,
was not limited by sources, but by a lack of imagination. The potential of writing
fiction about the Zoot Suit riots is the ability to fill in the gaps between what is
already known as fact. Sanchez chose not to take advantage of the opportunity
offered by his topic and genre. The timing of this novels’ publication suggests it
may have been titled as an attempt to profit from the popularity of Valdez’ play Zoot
Suit released that same year. This book is a romantic mystery about two Anglo
lovers that lived in East Los Angeles in 1943. It is not about zoot suiters, with the
exception of the characters only marginal to the novels’ plot.
Chicano activist Luis Valdez debuted his play Zoot Suit in 1978 at the Mark
Taper Forum, a prominent Los Angeles theatre. The play is significant because its
eleven months of sold out shows broke all previous records for Los Angeles theatre
and revived public interest on pachucos.
68
The play, and the film based on the play,
represents the single most influential cultural work on the topic. It reflected the
understanding of pachucos prevalent during the Chicano Movement and spread this
perspective more than any other academic or cultural source.
In the 1980s there were three excellent works of scholarship published on the

68
Luis Valdez. Zoot Suit: And other Plays Texas: Arte Publico Press. 1992. 11.

62

topic but unfortunately they still focused on the Riots and Los Angeles rather than on
pachucos, their culture, or the existence of pachuquismo anywhere else. Mauricio
Mazon’s book, published in 1984, entitled The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of
Symbolic Annihilation is the best book on the history of the Zoot-Suit Riots
published that decade. Although Mazon himself stated that his book was not a
historical account of the Riots, this book undoubtedly provided its readers with a
better understanding of the Riots by making use of his psychoanalytic degree and
presenting an explanation into the mind-set of what U.S. society at large and what
Los Angeles residents of all races in particular were thinking before, during, and
after the Riots. One of his contributions to the body of knowledge on the topic is
that he included previously unavailable army and naval accounts of the Riots. An
example of the issues he addressed include the assertion that during W.W.II,
civilians and even the majority of servicemen, never met face to face with the
enemy; as a consequence, their existed a psychological need to be face to face with
an enemy of the War. Furthermore, Mazon states that since servicemen were the
heroes, there also existed a psychological need for an anti-hero, and rebellious
pachucos were easily identified as anti-heroes. I would agree and add that after
interning Japanese Americans, pachucos were the most conspicuous potential “anti-
hero” in Los Angeles because pachuco culture was popular among Mexican
American youth and because ethnic Mexican were the largest “foreign” group in Los
Angeles.
69

69
Also generally stated by George J. Sanchez in Tovares, Joseph, "Zoot Suit Riots." Boston, Mass.:

63

The other two books focus on a topic related to pachucos and the riots, so
understandably, they end up presenting only a summary of both. How these books
summarize pachucos and the riots, however, is important because they demonstrate
what aspects of the riots were the most worth recounting. The second book that
came out in the eighties was Rodolfo Acuña’s third edition of Occupied America: A
History of Chicanos. Occupied America was published in 1988 and covered a broad
spectrum of Chicano history; from the 1830s to the 1960s and from Texas to
California, but it did, however, dedicate at least five pages to pachucos and the Riots.
In his recounting, Acuña introduced the Riots as one of the indicators of Mexican
Americans second-class citizen treatment they received during World War II. Acuña
also clarified that the sheriff’s and Los Angeles police did the discriminatory
arresting and that the newspapers sensationalized incidents to promote the theme of
“zoot-suit equals hoodlum” and racial hatred.
70
He also did a good job of
demonstrating that Filipinos and Blacks were also the targets of violence. The
potential for the Riots to become an international incident was also mentioned in his
summary. Overall, Acuña’s portrayal of the Riots is impressive and sufficient for a
standard textbook of Chicano history. As a canonical text of Chicano history, the
version of the Riots and pachucos in Occupied America is also the one that most
academics and undergraduate students are likely to have come across during the
1980s and 1990s.

WGBH Educational Foundation: PBS Home Video, 2002.

70
Rodolfo Acuña. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. Harper Collins Publishers. 1988. 256.

64

The third book which was also published in 1988 falls in the same category
as Acuña’s in regards to focusing on a related topic and therefore briefly addresses
pachucos. James Diego Vigil’s Barrio Gangs focuses on gang life and Mexican
American identity in Southern California. Vigil includes pachucos in a book on
contemporary Mexican American identity because the gangs that pachucos initiated
prior to and after the Riots are seen by contemporaries as the origins of modern
ethnic Mexican gangs in Los Angeles. Salinas’ poetry mentioned earlier is an
example of this belief. There are dozens of books that fit this category of books
which mention the riots and pachucos but do not give in-depth information about
them. To the two specific books just mentioned, an understanding of pachucos sheds
light into the history of Chicanos and that of present day gangs.
Valdez’ play Zoot Suit was adapted as a film and released in 1984 which re-
popularized common knowledge of pachucos, the Zoot Suit Riots and the Sleepy
Lagoon case. The play and the film are the most influential sources with regards to
informing the public about 1940s pachucos. Where as the first consensus regarding
the definition of pachucos was reached in 1943 due to the newspaper accounts of the
Riots, the portrayal of pachucos in the play and film Zoot Suit helped solidify the
sympathetic understanding of pachucos as far as the general public was concerned.
The new conception of pachucos flipped the role of the dominant and undercurrent
interpretations. In 1943 the dominant understanding of pachucos was the
unsympathetic portrayal in newspapers, and the undercurrent minority position was
one which defended them. The roles were reversed by 1984 when the sympathetic

65

position portrayed in the play and film Zoot Suit became the prevailing
understanding. No film can address as many aspects of the culture as a focused and
in-depth historical monograph. As a result there were many aspects of the culture
that still needed to be academically addressed after the play and film Zoot Suit.
Even though the sympathetic interpretation was the one being spread by Zoot
Suit, in several aspects, it was still reinforcing an understanding of pachucos that
reinforced the 1943 non-pachuco understanding of pachucos, instead of a more
nuanced one. The 1943 non-pachuco understanding was focused on the Sleepy
Lagoon Case, the Zoot Suit Riots, and Los Angeles. It focused on aspects of the
culture that were particular to Los Angeles in 1943 such as the Zoot Suit and the
African American influence of the culture. The remainder of the chapters in this
dissertation will delve into how pachuco culture differed from the 1943 Los Angeles
version of the culture by addressing aspects such as the origins, the pachuco caló
dialect, and Native American influences to pachuco culture.
The scholarship of the 1990s made great improvements. Three books from
this decade stand out. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity
in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 by George J. Sanchez was published in 1993.
Sanchez’s book is very informative regarding pachucos and the riots because it tells
the history of the Los Angeles Mexican Community from 1900-1945. He informs us
about pachucos and the riots by illustrating the context and experiences that
pachucos grew up with, and that their parents helped create prior to the Riots.
Becoming Mexican American is useful to the study of pachucos as background which

66

is imperative to understanding pachucos, but ultimately insufficient for a full study
of pachucos since the few pages dedicated to pachucos and the Riots are a minimal
component of the book’s focus.
Similarly, Vicki Ruiz in From Out of the Shadows, published in 1998, did an
excellent job of addressing Mexican immigration by placing women in the center of
her narrative. She also superbly addressed Mexican American young women in Los
Angeles during the 1930s and 1940s regarding generational conflict and
acculturation. Ruiz critiqued artists and academics for their exclusion of women as
subjects in works dealing with pachuco culture. As a result she asserted that
Mexican American pachucas merited even greater attention than pachucos since
pachucas had greater cultural tensions to deal with as a result of wanting to fit in
with “American girls” and simultaneously being expected to manifest Mexican
ideals of womanhood that did not apply to their male counterparts. Pachucas
certainly deserve more attention than they have received from scholarship. Acuña,
for example, did not mention any women in his textbook. However, while Ruiz did
a good job of addressing Los Angeles Mexican American adolescents’ generational
and intercultural tension with their parents, she hardly touched on pachucas herself.
Ultimately, Ruiz’s intervention is well taken and much of my understanding of
female participation in pachuca culture makes use of her analytical approach.
The third book of interest from the 1990s is Edward J. Escobar’s book
entitled Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and
the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900 -1945 dedicated the most attention to the

67

history of the Riots since Griffith’s American Me. Escobar’s book, published in
1999, primarily focused on the history of relations between the LAPD and the
Mexican community of Los Angeles. More specifically, Escobar covered the
political relationship between Mexicans and Mexican Americans in conflict with the
LAPD, local business interests, the printed press, and local politicians from 1900 and
1945. He argued that in 1900 the LAPD and the Mexican community of Los
Angeles did not hold any particular view of each other. The relationship between the
two groups deteriorated over time until 1943 and the Riots, when a relationship of
suspicion and hostility was solidified.
Escobar agreed with George J. Sanchez that repatriation during the
Depression helped produce a Mexican American identity. However, Escobar made a
crucial distinction and contribution by stating that it was not until WWII and after
that the Mexican American community in Los Angeles began to act politically based
on that identity. Twenty first century scholars of pachuco culture now argue that not
only WWII veterans of color returned with a sense of entitlement that led to the
formal political involvement and the beginning of de jure desegregation.
71
Prior to
and during WWII, pachucos were asserting their rights to be in un-segregated public
places like public transportation and dance halls. Pachuco culture is now interpreted
in a way in which their dress, ideology and behavior is interpreted as political acts.

71
Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War Ii,
American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008; Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels:
Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class: Free Press, 1996.

68

Escobar made several other contributions to the body of knowledge
concerning the Riots. His book is the first published historical study on the relations
between an urban police department and a minority group. Secondly, he included a
numerous collection of minor riots, the majority of which were previously unheard
of, which helps put the Zoot Suit Riots in the context of other similar incidents.
After Escobar, most scholars on the topic have included an understanding of the
Riots which takes into account the build up of minor riots prior to the Zoot Suit
Riots.
72

Escobar also included several arguments that needed to be made prior to this
book, such as an analysis of the newspaper articles on the topic. All previous
writings on the topic agreed that the printed press was full of sensationalistic
misrepresentations regarding Mexican Americans, but none analyzed in-depth just
how misconstrued the articles in these papers were. Complementary evidence
includes a detailed look into police tactics and culture that helped produce the
misconstrued headlines.
A limitation with Escobar’s book is that a number of his chapters are
preoccupied with the debate regarding whether or not each pertinent individual or
organization believed that ethnic Mexicans were inherently inclined toward violence
and/or criminality. On one hand, this had not been covered with so much evidence
before. On the other hand, the argument regarding whether it was individual law

72
Such as Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in
Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.; and Alvarez’s The Power of
the Zoot.

69

enforcement officers, and not the entire LAPD, that believed Mexicans were
inherently inclined toward criminality was not conclusively argued. Nevertheless, a
positive result that emerges as a result of his emphasis on this aspect is the important
distinction that regardless of whether a racist conservative believed Mexicans were
biologically inclined toward criminality, or a sympathetic liberal believed violence
and crime were a result of poverty and discrimination, they were both holding the
same assumption: that Mexican Americans were prone to violence and/or crime
when the evidence demonstrated they were not prone to violence and crime at all.
During the first decade of the twenty first century there have been great gains
accomplished in the study of pachuco culture. The most obvious trend has been
greater emphasis on pachuco youth and their culture instead of the Riots or Case.
Eduardo Pagan’s Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon completed the most thorough account
of Los Angeles, zoot culture, the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots.
73
His
is an excellent work that finally complicated the topic with nuanced analysis. Pagan,
for example, demonstrated that not all sleepy lagoon defendants were Mexican
American, that there were Anglo community activists that were more supportive of
the defendants than the Mexican American middle class, and he also debunked the
notion that zoot suits were exclusively worn by Mexican American youth. In fact, he
emphasized the extensive influence of African Americans and their culture on
Mexican American youth. With regards to the Case and the Riots, he introduced the

73
Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

70

important role state officials played in instigating both the Sleepy Lagoon incident
and the Riots.
Pagan’s monograph was a drastic improvement over all the previous
academic works, but the scholarship published during the last decade, especially that
of Luis Alvarez and Catherine S. Ramirez, made significant contributions. Power of
the Zoot, published by historian Luis Alvarez in 2008, built upon the foundation laid
by Pagan and took it to the next level.
74
Whereas Pagan summarized the Los
Angeles scene and emphasized the African American influence on Mexican
American youth, Alvarez broadened the scope with a bi-coastal perspective and also
focused the scope by adding the specifics of the cultural geography within Los
Angeles. He took Pagan’s explanation of the African Americans influence to
another level by seriously addressing Central Avenue in Los Angeles and Harlem in
New York. Alvarez argued that non-white youth were dehumanized in the home
front by racial segregation and discrimination in employment, housing and public
services. This first half of his major argument is similar to the Anti-Mexican
Hysteria Thesis.
The second half of his major argument, however, is a novel contribution to
the field. In this part of his argument, Alvarez asserts that the wearing a zoot suit
and the participation in jazz culture in Los Angeles and New York were ways in
which non-white youth sought to claim dignity and inclusion into the national polity.
This dissertation continues the conversation along this vein with the notion of

74
Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II,
American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008.

71

competing hierarchies. In congruence with Alvarez’ position, pachucos sought
dignity and respect through their participation in pachuco and zoot culture. I name
this phenomenon competing hierarchies, to point out that pachucos sought to claim
dignity via a cultural avenue that did not rest on getting approval, dignity or respect,
from mainstream society. Instead they created their own cultural hierarchy. One in
which they could be at the top of, and hence gain dignity without depending on
getting it from mainstream cultural norms.
Anthony Macias published his own monograph Mexican American Mojo the
same year as Alvarez.
75
His emphasis was on the music of Mexican American Los
Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s. Macias focused on not only the music, but the
dance and culture that Mexican Americans from Los Angeles participated in. In his
explanation of Mexican American culture, he explained how Mexican Americans in
Los Angeles were influenced by African Americans and jazz culture, how they
influenced jazz in return. He also demonstrated how and why Mexican Americans
were sometimes restricted by mainstream prejudices similarly to African Americans,
but at other times they managed to overcome the color line and benefit from
privileges that African Americans could not. One of the most obvious distinctions
between Macias’ work and my own with regards to our overlap on music and
musicians, is that he interpreted Lalo Guerrero and Don Tosti as musicians from Los
Angeles, while I, on the other hand, emphasize the influences that Guerrero and
Tosti brought with them from Tucson, Arizona and El Paso, Texas respectively.

75
Macias, Anthony Foster. Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in
Los Angeles, 1935-1968: Duke University Press, 2008.

72

Perhaps, the greatest gains made during the last decade have been in the area
of gender analysis. Alvarez and others took part in this, but Elizabeth Escobedo,
Catherine Ramirez, and Laura Lee Cummings have made the greatest gains.
Escobedo published the article “The Pachuca Panic” in 2007 where she paid serious
attention to the women of Sleepy Lagoon who had been direly neglected.
76
In this
work, she makes use of 250 Los Angeles County Superior Court Juvenile Division
case files to assess the official treatment of the young women deemed pachucas.
Escobedo concludes that during World War II, a time when complacency and
participation in a united home front was expected, many Mexican American women
chose to associate themselves with the pachuca persona, a new affirming and
racialized identity that they introduced to the WWII social landscape and “lexicon of
judicial discourse.”
The Woman in the Zoot Suit by Catherine Sue Ramirez is the latest published
work at the time this dissertation was completed.
77
Ramirez did the field of zoot
culture a great service by advancing the discussion by leaps and bounds with regard
to the degree to which female participants of zoot culture were understood
historically. Ultimately, Ramirez concluded that the scholarship on zoot culture
neglected women, their experiences, and their perspectives. The placement of
pachucas at the center of the topic produced new understandings for the construction

76
Escobedo, Elizabeth. "The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War Ii Los
Angeles." Western Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2007): 133-56.

77
Ramirez, Catherine Sue. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural
Politics of Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

73

of American nationalism during World War II and Chicano cultural nationalism
during the 1960s and 1970s.
This is the state of the scholarship at the time of the completion of this
dissertation. As stated in the introduction, the present dissertation’s aim is to focus
on telling the most through account of pachucos and their culture from its origins
until the 1950s when it evolved into other forms such as lowrider and vato loco
culture. Ethnic Mexicans are at the center of this analysis and a more comprehensive
approach is attempted by addressing the topic from its origins in the El Paso-Juarez
border area during the 1920s to the entire Southwest in the late 1940s.
Laura Lee Cummings has a book about to be published by the University of
Arizona Press. While her book was not in hand at the completion of this dissertation,
Cummings’ Ph.D. dissertation and an article published in 2003 lend insight into the
contributions she makes in her monograph.
78
Cummings’ dissertation “Que Siga El
Corrido” focused on pachuco culture in Tucson, Arizona. Her personal guidance and
dissertation have been invaluable to my dissertation research with regard to Tucson.
Cummings was the first to focus on Tucson pachuco culture, to point out the Native
American influences to pachuco culture, and to interview dozens of female
participants of pachuco culture. One distinction between Cummings anthropological
work and my own historical work is that Cummings does not make major
distinctions between pachuco culture from the 1940s and what she terms pachuco

78
Cummings, Laura Lee. "Que Siga El Corrido: Tucson Pachucos and Their Times." University of
Arizona, 1994; Cummings, "Cloth-Wrapped People, Trouble and Power: Pachuco Culture in the
Greater Southwest." Journal of the Southwest 45, no. 3 (2003).

74

culture decades later. My work distinguishes between pachuco culture and both
cultural precursors and post pachuco cultural developments such as lowrider, vato
loco, and cholo subcultures.
This chapter was not meant to be all-encompassing. One of its purposes was
to demonstrate how knowledge of pachuco culture was spread during the last six
decades by utilizing the concept of an ideological historiography which puts
academic and non-academic works in conversation with each other while taking
circulation and influence into account. These sources regarding pachucos and their
culture from 1920 to 2009 were categorized into six chronological periods. Those
from the first period between 1920 and 1941 were of minor long-term significance.
The sources produced around the Zoot Suit Riots largely defined the meaning of
what pachucos were to the general public and even much of the ethnic Mexican
population. This definition permanently associated pachucos with Los Angeles,
Zoot Suits and Mexican Americans of the second generation. Whereas the
unsympathetic view prevailed during 1942 and 1943, the sympathetic view persisted
during the late forties and early fifties until it became the dominant view by the late
1960s and after. From the 1980s to 2009 the works on pachucos became more
focused, through, complex, and inclusive. Unfortunately, the overwhelming
majority of the work continues to focus on Los Angeles due to the availability of
sources and the identification of pachuco culture with Los Angeles despite the
culture’s popularity in various parts of the U.S. Southwest and urban Mexico both
before and after World War II. It is the ambitious task of this dissertation to tackle

75

this challenge. Pachuquismo was locally distinct, among other factors, primarily
because of demographics, segregation, discrimination and length of residency.
Ciudad Juarez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, on the U.S.-Mexico border is
where the meta-narrative of this dissertation begins, and as such, is the topic of the
proceeding chapter.

76

CHAPTER 2: EL PASO, JUAREZ, AND THE GREAT MEXICAN
MIGRATION

It all began with a minor scuffle. Two soldiers knocked down two Mexicans
from the sidewalk in front of the Majestic Theatre on Broadway. Soon about 25
Anglo soldiers and civilians joined in. “Then began a general slugging match,”
reported one local newspaper. “No Mexican whom they encountered escaped
their blows. Down Broadway they passed... The cry was, ‘Let’s get down and
clean them out,” the newspaper continued. Soon the mob grew to 1,500, many
armed with clubs and knives. The Times explained, “There was no difficulty in
following the path of the soldiers and civilians who had joined them. Bleeding
Mexicans lined the route.” One observer remembered seeing “old and young
men and even women lying on the streets.”
79

Most people, and even most historians, associate zoot suits with Malcolm X,
swing music, or the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 in Los Angeles. Yet, the riots in the
epigraph above took place in El Paso, Texas in 1916, and have no direct relationship
to the activist, the musical genre, or Los Angeles. They do, however, help us
understand the context in which pachuco culture was born. The 1916 El Paso race
riot ended with ethnic Mexicans, including soldiers from Juárez, ready to fight
Anglos who entered the second ward; and General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing
prohibiting an Anglo mob of thousands from venturing south of Overland Street into
the heart of Mexican El Paso, Segundo Barrio. Most scholarship that addresses
pachucos, acknowledges an association between pachucos and the city of El Paso,
but scant historical research has been conducted regarding these pachuco origins.
80

Because of the Zoot Suit Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon Case, the bulk of the primary

79
David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso
and Juárez, 1893-1923, El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005. 220.

80
George C. Barker, "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in Tucson,
Arizona." In The Mexican Experience in Arizona, edited by Carlos E. Cortes. New York: Arno Press,
1976; Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation, Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1984.

77

sources documenting the existence of pachucos relate exclusively to Los Angeles.
81

This chapter credits El Paso as the birthplace of pachuquismo by citing the historical
evidence of pachuco culture and introducing their cultural precursors in El Paso and
Juárez from 1910 to 1943.
In 1943, pachucos were defined as young Mexican American men who wore
zoot-suits in Los Angeles. These definitive pachucos wore suits to dances where
they listened and danced to swing music. They would communicate with each other
in a distinctive dialect called caló. They would congregate in groups or gangs, and
some of them committed juvenile delinquency. Mexican American pachucos were
distinct from their racial and ethnic counterparts, such as African American hep-cats,
or the Jewish and Italian zoot-suiters. This definition, however, made a caricature of
the multitude of variations real people experienced. Practitioners of pachuco culture
included female pachucas, adults, non-jazz aficionados, formal language speakers,
and even law abiding patriotic American citizens, not to mention youth throughout
the U.S. with completely different experiences.
Because the concept of pachucos was solidified at a particular time and place,
at first impression, it may seem that other cities either before or after the Zoot Suit
Riots did not have “real” pachucos. But the creation of the pachuco necessitated the

81
Luis Alberto Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II
(University of California Press, 2008); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political
Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945, Latinos in
American Society and Culture; (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Anthony F. Macias,
Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968
(Duke University Press, 2008); Eduardo O. Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race
and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

78

coalescing of various cultural factors, each of which has a history of its own.
Pachucos were not the first to invent swing music, nor gangs, nor the Spanish dialect
of caló. They chose from the musical, linguistic, and fashionable options around
them, modified some of them, and created their own unique combination. Before the
pachuco was popularly defined in 1943 Los Angeles, there were cultural influences
brought to Los Angeles such as those from Native American Yaquis in Tucson,
Arizona addressed in Chapter 3, from African Americans and Jazz music across the
country which is addressed in multiple chapters, or from Mexico and the border
region as this chapter and the last chapter illustrate.
The tirili from El Paso and Juárez during the 1930s and 1940s is the most
immediate cultural precursor to the pachuco of Los Angeles in 1943. However, the
development of what came to be called pachuquismo can be traced to the cultural
expressions of the 1910s and the Mexican Revolution. Prohibition also facilitated
power dynamics and cultural practices that developed into pachuco-esque
associations of ethnic Mexicans during the 1920s. Ultimately, while the surge in
Mexican immigration during the 1920s gave birth to the Mexican American cohort
that came of age in the early 1940s, El Paso had a local surge, because of the
Mexican Revolution, during the 1910s that gave rise to a Mexican cohort about a
decade earlier. These local circumstances help explain why pachuco culture
manifested itself about a decade earlier in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez than in Los
Angeles.

79

In 1945 George C. Barker, an anthropologist, was writing his own
dissertation on pachucos in Tucson, Arizona.
82
During his research, he found many
informants who would tell him that the pachuco manner of speaking came from El
Paso. Barker called this language “pachuco,” I call it “pachuco caló” in order to
distinguish it from other types of caló, such as that used in various regions of
Mexico. In Mexico, caló is roughly translated to mean “slang.”
Barker corresponded with academics in El Paso and came across Gabriel
Cordova, a graduate student and Mexican American court interpreter, who wrote a
letter to Barker pinpointing the El Paso street-corner and gang that he believed had
started pachuco caló. 7 X was the name of the gang, and the corner of 8
th
and
Florence was the territory they claimed.
83
This was in the middle of the ethnic
Mexican neighborhood known as Segundo Barrio, named after its formal political
designation as the second ward. It was the same neighborhood Pershing designated
“out of bounds” for the Anglo rioters in 1916, mentioned in the opening of this
chapter.

82
Barker conducted his thesis research 1945-1947. Barker got the letter from Cordova in June 1948
after serving as an interpreter for “several” years.

83
Gabriel Cordova, “Notes to Barker about El Paso Pachucos,” June 1948. George C. Barker
Collection, University of Arizona Special Collections, Southwest Folklore Center, Box 85-2/B-2,
folder 1/74.

80

Figure 1: 1920s Map of El Paso, Texas
84

The life and music of Edmundo Martinez Tostado, better known as Don
Tosti, also adds credence to the notion that pachucos or certain aspects of pachuco
culture where brought from the El Paso area by individuals like him. In the lyrics to
one of his songs recorded in Los Angeles in 1948, Tostado himself, makes the
following statements,
Original Song Lyrics English Translation
“vengo del Paciente, vez I came from El Paciente, see?
un lugar que le dicen El Paso, a place called El Paso,
nomas que de alla vienen los pachucos that’s where pachucos like
como yo, veh? me come from, see?
85

The lyrics in Tostado’s song Pachuco Boogie explicitly state that pachucos like him
came from El Paso. Since the voices of pachucos from the 1940s are extremely rare

84
El Paso 1920s. University of Texas Library.

85
Don Tosti’s Pachuco Boogie Boys “Pachuco Boogie” 1948.

81

to find. Tostado’s lyrics serve as important historical evidence of pachucos’ voice,
identity, and in this specific case, regional influence. From the lyrics of another one
of Tostado’s songs one discovers the use of another term related to pachuco culture
that came from El Paso.
Original Song Lyrics English Translation
Nunca ha visto un Tirili Ever seen a Tirili?
Los vatos que se ponen buti high The guys that get really “high”
luego luego quieren fight ... right away they want to “fight”
Con que me puse todo tirili?... With what did I get so tirili (high)?
la cervesita, no no no ... a little beer, no no no...
la tequilita, no no no a little tequila, no no no
el sacatito, si si si... a little weed, yes yes yes
liga linga liga la la ganga [scat singing]
86

The lyrics above are from a song recorded in 1948 by Don Tosti who used the word
“tirili” as a noun and plural noun. Tostado was raised in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio
and lived there until he moved to Los Angeles in 1938 and developed his career as a
musician.
87
He used the word “tirili” primarily as a label for someone who smoked
marijuana. Tostado also used “tirili” to describe the sensation of being under the
influence of the drug. This multiple use of the same word is one of the
characteristics of pachuco caló. The smoking of marijuana was one of the
associations commonly made to pachucos of the 1940s throughout the Southwest,
but there is evidence that suggests that the use of the word came from the border
cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua in Mexico.

86
Don Tosti’s Pachuco Boogie Boys “El Tirili,” 1948.

87
Chuy Varela, Pachuco Boogie: Historic Mexican American Music-Volume 10, Compact Disk, CD
Insert, Arhoolie Productions, 2002. 11.

82

Germán Valdés, a teenage resident of Ciudad Juárez since the early 1930s,
recalled listening to a Spanish language radio show broadcast from across the
international border in El Paso that would occasionally comment on “Tirilones de la
Coyotera.”
88
The phrase, used in this way meant, the Reefer Smugglers. Tirilones
meant that they smoked marijuana, sold it, or both. Coyotera referred to their
practice of smuggling contraband across the border, mostly marijuana but also other
merchandise (including laborers).
During the Zoot Suit Riots, the newspaper articles in La Opinion of Los
Angeles would refer to pachucos by using the term “pachucos” exclusively. Even
Anglo and African American zoot suiters were referred to as Black or White
pachucos. By contrast, an article in El Paso’s Spanish-language newspaper, El
Continental, helps illustrate that the topic of pachuco culture was more complex (and
developed) in El Paso than in Los Angeles. In El Paso, pachucos were also referred
to as Tirilis, Kalifas, and Tarzanes. Just as in Los Angeles, “pachucos” were said to
come from El Paso. “Kalifas” was how El Pasoans referred to pachucos that came
from, or had been to, California. Tarzanes reffered to “macho” men, especially from
Mexico. The term tirilis, as previously stated, had been used since at least the early
1930s to refer to marijuana smokers and smugglers of El Paso and Juárez.
89
One
irony is that while pachuco came from the phrase “pa’ El Chuco” or “To El Paso” it
was actually attributed to youths from El Paso, not to those going to El Paso. In the

88
Rosalia Valdes, La Historia Inedita De Tin Tan: (Editorial Planeta, 2005), 25.

89
Fray Callejero, El continental, June 8, 1943. Divagaciones de un Flojo, “Si Usted No Lo Sabia,” 2.

83

border town itself, certainly by the time of the Zoot Suit Riots in June of 1943,
pachucos going to El Paso were called “Kalifas,” meaning pachucos from California.
So in El Paso the terminology was more complex and developed. In fact, in El Paso
and Ciudad Juárez, before they were called pachucos, they referred to pachucos
primarily as “Tirilis” since at least the early 1930s.
A second major argument of this chapter has to do with the theme of the
second generation. Pachuco culture of the 1940s has been typically explained as part
of the Mexican American generation. This means that being a pachuco was one of
the cultural options available to the children of Mexican immigrants who came to the
U.S. with the “Great Mexican Migration” of the 1920s. However, many of the
cultural symbols of the pachuco had precursors dating back to the 1910s.
The 1910s are the decade of the Mexican Revolution. And while Mexican
immigration to the Southwest skyrocketed during the 1920s, locally in El Paso there
was a huge surge in Mexican immigration during the 1910s. This was because some
of the earliest battles were fought right across the international border from El Paso
in Ciudad Juárez. I argue that the surge in local immigration to El Paso during the
1910s, also led to the birth of many Mexican Americans, which led to a local cohort
of Mexican Americans which dealt with very similar issues to that of the Mexican
American generation that came of age during the 1940s, but a decade earlier in the
1930s. This explains why Mexican American identity and pachuco culture took
shape in El Paso during the 1930s prior to the rest of the Southwest in the 1940s.

84

But before delving into the 1910s allow me to briefly set up the context of El Paso,
Ciudad Juárez, and especially Segundo Barrio.
El Paso was an outgrowth of the Mexican city Ciudad Juárez, on the United
States side of the Rio Grande River and international border. With a larger Anglo
population in the late nineteenth century, came greater Anglo dominance of local
institutions, and segregation of ethnic Mexicans in El Paso. Largely excluded from
the northern half of the city, that is north of the railroad tracks, ethnic Mexicans lived
in the second ward, the southern section of El Paso adjacent to the international
border. While the second ward was a monolithic whole to outsiders, residents of the
area distinguished between various internal sections. Despite being called
“Mexicans,” U.S. born Americans of Mexican descent lived in what second ward
residents called “Segundo Barrio.” This area was bound by the railroad tracks and
Overland Street to the north, and the international border to the south, east and west.
Before it became Segundo Barrio, however, the ethnic Mexican side of town was
unofficially referred to as “Chihuahuita,” Chihuahua is the Mexican state that
borders El Paso Texas to the south, hence the name meaning little Chihuahua. By
the 1910s, Mexican Americans had passed on the name Chihuahuita to the poorest
section of the Segundo Barrio. This area was inhabited by the most recent Mexican
immigrants and was full of temporary camps that were periodically washed away by
floods only to be rebuilt by its residents.

85

Table 1: El Paso Demographics by Thousands, 1900-1950
90

0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
1900 1916 1930 1950
Anglo & Non Mexican
Ethnic Mexicans

1910s El PASO AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
While Mexican immigration to the U.S. did not skyrocket until after 1919,
locally in El Paso, the Mexican population, along with its culture and institutions
burgeoned during the 1910s, or about a decade earlier than most southwestern
barrios. In 1910 the population of El Paso was officially 39,000 and about 52%
ethnic Mexican. In 1916, the U.S. Census took an extra count of El Paso’s
population because of the large immigration from Mexico and WWI. According to
this mid-decade count, ethnic Mexicans alone made up 39,000. Additionally, El
Paso historians agree that Mexicans were undercounted by the U.S. Census.
Mexican refugees, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans of ethnic descent could have
accounted for up to 20% more than the official 57% of the total population of 1916.

90
Sources for numbers in bar graph. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 Volume~3.
Population pg 771; Oscar J. Martinez The Chicanos of El Paso: An Assessment of Progress. El Paso:
Texas Western Press, 1980. 6; Mario T. Garcia Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-
1920. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. 46.; Manuel B. Ramirez "El Pasoans: Life and
Society in Mexican El Paso, 1920-1945." Ph.D. Diss, University of Mississippi, 2000. 24-25.

86

Table 2: Special U.S. Census of El Paso in 1916
91

Mexican descent 32,737 47.5 %
Whites (not Mexican) 27,359 39.7 %
Mexican Refugees 6,554 9.5 %
Negroes 1,514 2.2 %
White Refugees 482
Chinese 243
Japanese 41
Indians 5
Total 68,935
Most of the Mexican businesses established in the 1910s catered to refugees
of the Revolution, especially the elite. More than 12 movie houses were built in the
1910s to cater to elite Mexican refugees. These refugees did not move into the
Mexican south side of El Paso either, they bought houses in the Sunset Heights
neighborhood outside Segundo Barrio. These elite included professionals such as:
lawyers, doctors, bankers, millionaires, and merchants.
92
During the 1910s Anglo
neighbors were tolerant of their presence but they began to move out of the area by
the 1930s.
93
The census category of “Mexican refugee” only took into account this
middle and upper class segment of the Mexican population, but without a doubt,
much of the growth in the “Mexican descent” category came from lower and
working class Mexican refugees that were not officially recognized as “refugees.”
Anglos and Mexicans of every class enjoyed the comedy of Charlie Chaplin,
and films like Bronco Billy and the Bad Man, and Dante’s Inferno. In 1919 the

91
Romo, 197.

92
ibid., 180.

93
Manuel Ramirez, “El Pasoans: Life and Society in Mexican El Paso, 1920-1945.” Ph.D. Diss.,
University of Mississippi, 2000.

87

names of the theatres that catered to Spanish language audiences were: the Hidalgo,
the Rex, the Ideal, Teatro Mexico, Teatro Iris, the Colon, the Alcazar, the Estrella,
the Paris, the Crystal, the Alameda and the Alhambra theatre.
94
Some of these
venues also held vaudeville acts and musical shows. Throughout the twentieth
century, Teatro Colon, for example, held performances by great Mexican actors,
singers, and comedians like Cantinflas, Pedro Infante, and the pachuco comedian Tin
Tan. Silvio Lacoma, its owner, owned other theaters in both the U.S. and Mexico,
one of which was in Ciudad Juárez.
While there was a surge in Mexican cultural production in the Southwest
during the 1920s to account for the growth of Mexican immigrants during that
decade; locally there was a dramatic surge in cultural production in El Paso during
the 1910s. Cultural historian David D. Romo called the cultural production of the
early 20
th
century in El Paso a “renaissance” in Spanish language journalism and
literature. A multitude of newspapers, political manifestos, serial novels, poetry, and
essays were published in El Paso. The first novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de
Abajo, was written by Mariano Azuela while he was living in El Paso’s Segundo
Barrio.
95
It was first printed in 1915 in El Paso in sections in one of the many local
El Paso newspapers, before it was later published as a complete novel.

94
Romo, 181.

95
ibid., 18.

88

Between 1890 and 1925 more than 40 Spanish Language newspapers were
published in El Paso.
96
Many of these newspapers focused on politics because the
editors were activists, anarchists, and revolutionaries. Victor L. Ochoa, the editor of
El Hispano Americano, led a rebellion against Mexican President Diaz in 1893.
Lauro Aguirre, printed the feminist La Voz de La Mujer in the early 1900s. The
famous phrase usually attributed to the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, was first
printed and coined in El Paso in 1909. “It is better to die on your feet, than to live on
your knees” was written by Praxedis Guerrero and published in the Punto Rojo
newspaper out of El Paso.
97

Mexican ideologues printed their newspapers in the U.S. to avoid being jailed
for their anti-Diaz ideas in Mexico. Printing in the U.S., however, was only
marginally safer as Spanish language editors were often harassed, censored and
imprisoned by U.S. authorities. Ricardo Flores Magón, one of the primary
ideologues responsible for sparking the Mexican Revolution, was sued and arrested
many times. Ultimately he died in a U.S. prison in the 1920s while serving a twenty
year sentence for questioning, in one of his publications, the needless loss of life of
U.S. soldiers during WWI.
During the 1910s Mexican nationals and their culture were in regular contact
with the U.S. South and Southwest. Before the Revolution, Mexican military bands
regularly performed in the U.S. On one occasion, a military band played in New

96
ibid., 18.

97
ibid., 19.

89

Orleans where some band members deserted the Mexican military and stayed in the
U.S. Some scholars have argued Mexican musicians influenced the creation of
Jazz.
98
Waltzes, mazurkas, polkas and marches were favorite musical genres in 1911
during the Battle of Juárez.
99

Trinidad Concha was a Mexican band member who in 1911 played for
thousands of spectators in the Madero camp right across the border. He played
waltzes, danzas habaneras, and military marches. In 1916 one-fourth of an 82
member Mexican military band deserted and stayed in El Paso. Concha was one of
those who decided to stay in El Paso.
100

When Pancho Villa took control of Ciudad Juárez (1913-1915), the musical
genre of corridos became the most popular. Corridos, as Americo Paredes
described, were “a music born of conflict” and further explained that a “Mexican
American folklore must be sought in the conflict of cultures.”
101
The genre’s lyrics
were raw, bawdy, unpretentious, direct, and made no concessions to the tastes of the
rich. It was the music of the streets, guerrilla camp, or any gathering of Los de Abajo
(Azuela’s term for lowest class in society). Lyrics were composed by anonymous
authors, sometimes as a group composition. As they documented events, along with

98
Romo, 121; For Mexican American influences of Swing music see Macias, Anthony Foster.
Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968:
Duke University Press, 2008.

99
ibid., 114.

100
ibid., 125, 138

101
Americo Paredes, A Texas Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border 1976. xxv.

90

dates and names, they served as a form of newspaper or history book for the
illiterate.
102

In certain aspects, the corrido singers and composers were linguistic and
musical precursors of Mexican American pachucos, with their slang, guitars, and
associations with the streets. Corrido lyrics were very creative and their composers
invented new words and expressions. For example, there were at least three ways of
saying “to die,” including “estirar las patas” (stretch your legs), “irse pa’l otro
barrio” (go to the other neighborhood), and “saludar a San Cuilmas” (greet Saint
Cuilmas). La Cucaracha, one of the most popular corridos on either side of the
border was created by Villa rebels who added verses to the song as their military
campaign progressed and where even said to sing it into battle.
103
In later decades,
pachucos would play the guitar, sing corridos, and add their own pachuco calo to
traditional corridos. While corridos are the genre of music quintessentially
associated with the decade of the Mexican Revolution, in fact there were other
genres they competed with. Early forms of Jazz were increasingly popular in 1910s
El Paso where there were at least three Jazz clubs: The Rainbow Room, the Red
Mill, and the Modern Cafe where the Waterhouse Jazz Band regularly performed.
104

Jazz had early roots in both El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

102
Romo, 132 Romo does not say history book, I do.

103
ibid., 131.

104
ibid., 145.

91

Prior to and during the Mexican Revolution, Juárez and El Paso were full of
secret agents, double agents, and free agents, most of which focused on espionage
for the illicit smuggling of arms and ammunition for various revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary factions. The Shelton-Payne Arms Company at 301 S. El Paso
St., for example, was one business that successfully supplied all factions of the
revolution during the 1910s.
105
Silvestre Terrazas, who edited and printed the
Spanish language newspaper La Patria from 1919 to 1925 out of El Paso helped
smuggle weapons for Pancho Villa. This popular activity of the 1910s was the
beginning of the association of Mexicans with border smuggling.
Along with smuggling came the association with vice. Since the 1880s El
Paso had a Red Light District with gambling halls, theaters, and saloons. They were
so popular that in 1882 it is said there was a bar room for every 200 persons in El
Paso.
106
This was the case until 1918 when the city enforced federal Prohibition. It
only took a few months for the El Paso bars, saloons, casinos, and Jazz clubs to be
moved by their mostly Anglo owners to Juárez.
107

The 1910s provided a basis for the flourishing of pachuco culture by
establishing a precedent for Mexican border smuggling, a network of underworld
activity, experience for smugglers, and a large growth in the ethnic Mexican
population of El Paso whose children would reach their teenage and young adult

105
Romo, 109.

106
Mario Garcia, Desert Immigrants, 14.

107
Romo, 145.

92

years by the late 1920s and early 1930s. Pachuco cultural precursors included: the
corridos of the Mexican revolutionaries, the participation of Mexican musicians in
the jazz genre, and the association of Mexicans with border smuggling. Ironically,
most of the smuggling during the Mexican Revolution was from the U.S. and into
Mexico. A local cohort of children born in the 1910s, to the young adults that
crossed the border during the Mexican Revolution, became a cultural precursor to the
Mexican American generation who came of age in the late 1930s and 1940s, and
were the children of the “great migration” of the 1920s.
THE GREAT MIGRATION OF THE 1920s
Mexicans immigrated to work in the mines of Southern Arizona, New
Mexico, Colorado, and Nebraska, to the ranches and farms of south Texas, and to the
construction and maintenance of southwestern railroads. However, the agricultural
demands for Mexican labor were the greatest. In addition to the economic
devastation after the Mexican Revolution and the attraction of the U.S. economy,
immigration laws helped create a demand for Mexican labor during the 1920s. The
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, and the
Immigration Acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924 increasingly curtailed other sources of
inexpensive labor.
108
With most Mexican immigrants ending up in Texas and
California, the most populous concentrations of ethnic Mexicans in urban areas were
Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso.

108
Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American, 18-19.

93

When the U.S. Border Patrol was created in 1924 their main concerns were
Chinese immigration and alcohol trafficking. But as in New York and Chicago,
Prohibition created new opportunities for black markets that led to the growth of
illegal organizations. This is when business owners in Juárez began to take
advantage of the demand for alcohol in the U.S. Marijuana was also a popular drug
among Mexicans during the 1930s and 1940s, hence much trafficking of marijuana
began as early as the 1920s.
A data sample of migrants who crossed the border between 1900 and 1930
demonstrates that 43.7% of them were between the ages of 13 and 24 at the time of
crossing.
109
Hence, a large proportion of immigrants arrived at an age in which they
were either susceptible to the pachuco cultural precursors by taking part in popular
cultural trends. Young immigrants were also at an age when many dated, married
and started families which led to a cohort of Mexican Americans in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. About a million Mexicans crossed into the U.S. during this period,
mostly during the 1920s.
110
It was no longer just Mexicans doing the border
crossing. During the 1920s American musicians and tourists from all over the U.S.
poured into Ciudad Juárez by the thousands for alcohol, drugs, jazz, and sex.
111

Whereas 14,000 U.S. tourists crossed into Mexico during the year 1918-1919, the

109
Sanchez, 35.

110
Garcia, 36.

111
Romo, 138.

94

following year the number grew to 419,000 American tourists who went into Ciudad
Juárez.
112

An article from the El Paso Herald printed on June 30, 1921 tells us much
about Americans crossing the border into Juárez during prohibition. It cited federal
statistics which estimated that 1,000 women went into Juárez on a nightly basis,
while the numbers were much higher on the weekends. The article even broke down
the female visitors by age explaining that about 60% were under 35 years old and
30% were under 25. It described the variety of people who went and returned from
Juárez which included both the young and the middle-aged, both bootleggers and
“hopheads” (opium addicts), as well as both hard working shop girls and the
presumably less-hard-working show girls.
It also described some of the encounters customs inspectors had with people
returning from Juárez, particularly young women. One such crossing involved a car
full of married adults, sitting on top of each other. The dialogue included the
following statements,
“Are you married?” asked a customs inspector
“I’m not married to this man either” a woman replied
“My husband is somewhere else” said another
“And I’m a widow” said another woman who looked age 23

Another encounter involved a car full of inebriated young women sitting on top of
men, and in both cases cars with inebriated occupants were allowed to get through
without any problems from the inspectors. As the newspaper article’s description of

112
ibid., 145

95

border crossers attests, Ciudad Juárez was transformed into the underground jazz and
alcohol capital of the Southwest within months of prohibition.
113
The manner of
reporting these border crossings also attests to El Paso’s concern over propriety by
young women. Some of these concerns parallel those attributed to the changing
gender roles during World War II, especially that of greater independence from
families for women and youth in general.
Interactions were different, however, when it was a streetcar going through
instead of a private vehicle demonstrating biased treatment of less affluent
commuters by border agents and the newspapers. In one such incident, a female was
promptly profiled as a “hophead’ and searched for opium. The inspector found
nothing on the “hophead” and the streetcar was given the signal to go through, but as
soon as the streetcar moved forward an inspector noticed the tip of a sheet of paper
poking out of the crevice of a lowered window. The inspector chased after the
streetcar, made it stop and revealed a parcel containing cocaine and morphine. The
suspicion with which the less affluent border-crossers were treated provides insight
into the treatment ethnic Mexicans received at the border.
114

From 1918 to 1925 most Americans went to a six-block zone of Juárez with
200 bars and restaurants along Calle Comercio (16 de Septiembre today) and
Avenida Juárez. Some of the bars included the Cafe Central where the Cuauhtemoc

113
Romo, 141-143.

114
For more on the treatment of Mexican immigrants at the El Paso border crossing see Alexandra
Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America:
University of California Press, 2005.

96

Marimba Band began playing in 1919 and where Severo Gonzalez’s Central Cafe
band (from El Paso) played mostly ragtime era tunes until the late 20s, when he
brought in the swing trumpeter Frankie Quatrell. Jazz musicians in Juárez were not
sub-par either. Quatrell, for example, went on to record with swing superstars Benny
Goodman and Glenn Miller.
115

Juárez gambling halls brought diverse people together including: the “well
dressed tourists from California and the East, slouching peons, Chinese, Negroes,
Mexicans, gamblers, bartenders, detectives, guards, police, women, hopheads,
prosperous bootleggers, all [of which] rub shoulders at the table.” There was very
little class distinction as long as the individual had money to spend.
116
After the
Mexican Revolution, some former secret agents changed their vocation from
smuggling weapons, ammunition, and cash into Mexico; to smuggling drugs,
especially alcohol and marijuana, into the U.S.
117

Many El Pasoans disliked jazz, alcohol, and the racial intermingling that
constituted the Juárez nightlife during the late teens and early twenties. The
Women’s Club in El Paso, for example, was openly pro-prohibition and anti-jazz.
The Director of the Fifth Cavalry Band at Fort Bliss in El Paso expressed his disdain
for jazz with the following public statements “Jazz is prostitution of music,” “Jazz
music originated in the underworld,” and “It is nothing but noise, and appeals

115
Romo, 145-146.

116
ibid., 145.

117
ibid., 109. But also including opium and morphine.

97

particularly to the younger element.” But even outspoken opponents of jazz, like this
Director, admitted its high demand by stating that, “Jazz ruins every musician who
caters to it, most of whom do it through sheer force of necessity, or who would
otherwise lose their income.”
118
In the 1920s, the Rainbow Room, the Red Mill and
the Modern Cafe continued to cater to El Paso’s jazz enthusiasts, to the annoyance of
others.
Much of the anti-Jazz commotion came from members of the local Klu Klux
Klan who waged an anti-vice campaign in 1921 that included mailing letters to
residents advising them not to go into Juárez. The following year more than one
thousand members attended an initiation meeting, burned crosses on the local
mountain, and paraded in downtown El Paso. The local KKK was not marginal to El
Paso politics either, in fact, its members held control over several important
institutions including, the American Legion, the Masonic Lodge, the National Guard,
and, perhaps most importantly for local ethnic Mexicans, the El Paso schools.
Eleven out twelve El Paso Herald staffers were also KKK members. Some KKK
leaders included protestant ministers, the most vocal of which where from the Trinity
and Southern Baptist Church. These ministers’ proposals included bombing Juárez
and closing the border during the afternoon to stop “interracial debauchery.”
119

This kind of public leadership helped keep ethnic Mexicans living a very
segregated existence in El Paso. Some ethnic Mexican interview subjects were

118
Romo., 148.

119
ibid.

98

proud and nostalgic of their El Paso upbringing. This may have been aided by the
fact that they made up the numerical majority (at least 57% in 1916). On the other
hand, since Anglos dominated the city’s civic, economic, and educational life, many
came to be conscious of Anglos’ discrimination toward them. During the late 19th
century and the first decades of the 20th century Segundo Barrio was a segregated
neighborhood that provided housing for the working poor of El Paso. The barrio
received few funds from the city to improve housing, build schools and recreational
centers, provide health-care, or promote economic development. The city failed to
fix many of the basic housing needs in the barrio, and did not force property owners
to improve living conditions. A 1927 article in a local Spanish language newspaper
explained “Those owners are the first to say that we Mexicans like to live like
animals, when it is them... who are the culprits for these disastrous conditions.”
120

Along those same lines, City officials continually described the barrio as a
place of disease, crime, and backwardness. They viewed the South side as the cause
of the city’s problems and pushed forward plans to “renovate,” “redevelop,” or
“clean-up” south El Paso without much regard for the hundreds of families displaced
from their homes. One of the first urban removal projects in Segundo Barrio was
during the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920). Before leading his failed punitive
expedition for Pancho Villa in 1916, General John J. Pershing’s troops forcibly
removed the residents of Chihuahuita and burned down their homes. According to
Alexandra Minna Stern, “Pershing’s men hosed streets, burned ... refuse, and tore

120
El continental, March 10, 1927.

99

down dwellings.”
121
Similar demolitions occurred in 1910, 1913, 1916, 1925, 1931,
and 1947.
Cultural precursors to pachuco culture from the 1920s include: the Juarez
jazz scene, the association of smuggling and marijuana with ethnic Mexicans, and
the exposure of most Mexican immigrants to Mexican American bilingual culture in
Juarez and El Paso as they made their way into the Southwest. This does not
necessarily mean that jazz aficionados or border smugglers from the 1920s literally
became pachucos in the 1930s. The various characteristics of pachuco culture did
not come together and become identified as such until the late 1930s and early
1940s. Prior to that, there were cultural precursors that increasingly came together
into the pachuco cultural archetype.
1930s EL PASO SOCIAL LIFE
The El Paso/Juárez border was the entry point through which most Mexicans
entered the U.S. during the 1920s. During the Great Depression, however, El Paso
became the most popular exit point for Mexicans and their U.S. born children to
return to Mexico. Some returned by choice, others were pressured by county
agencies to either accept a free railroad ticket to Mexico or stay in the U.S. without a
job or charity. Close to five hundred thousand people left the U.S. for Mexico
during this decade and most crossed through El Paso on their way there. While most
passed through quickly, many decided to stay temporarily or permanently in either El

121
Stern, Alexandra Minna. "Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building
on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930." Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999): 41-
81.

100

Paso or Juárez. A significant percentage came from California, many specifically
came from Los Angeles. Many had left El Paso for Los Angeles during the 1920s
only to return in the 1930s. During the 1940s, however, there was new wave of
migrants from El Paso heading to Los Angeles, but this time it included many U.S.
born youth.
One estimate attests that 65 thousand passed through El Paso and Juárez in
1931 and 1932 alone. In 1932, a caravan of about twenty five thousand repatriates
was reported to have entered Juárez.
122
The newspaper El Continental reported on
the fact that Mexicans were being frightened in Los Angeles. The story of Herlinda
Castro was one of those examples.
123
Mrs. Castro was born in the Mexican state of
Michoacan, settled in L.A. in 1927 where she had three children. During the
Depression her husband decided to repatriate his family against her will, so they sold
all their belongings for $3 save a sewing machine which she kept to make a living.
They “repatriated” from Los Angeles to El Paso in 1933.
The Mexican immigration of the 1920s “Mexicanized” many barrios
throughout the Southwest. This 1930s period of repatriation, which drastically
decreased new immigration from Mexico, is credited with helping to create the
“Mexican American Generation.” This generation was made up largely of the
children of the 1920s wave who came of age in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The
Mexican American Generation grappled with their identity. They were not Mexican

122
Manuel Bernardo Ramirez, "El Pasoans: Life and Society in Mexican El Paso, 1920-1945."
Dissertation, University of Mississippi, 2000. 154, 156.

123
Ramirez, 155.

101

because they were born in the U.S., had lived their whole lives in the U.S., did not
speak proper Spanish, were educated in the U.S., had been the targets of
Americanization campaigns, and lived in communities that were slowly but
increasingly Americanized. However, they were not fully American because they
were perceived to be and treated as foreigners and second-class citizens; they were
discriminated against in employment, housing, and education; they often spoke poor
English and, in most cases, they were not allowed to socialize with Anglos.
Mexican Americans of this generation responded to their circumstances in
different ways. Some sought to fight for their rights as American citizens, some
even fought for these rights arguing for legal whiteness. Others responded by
creating their own culture. If they were not accepted as fully American, nor fully
Mexican, then they embraced who they were, a little bit of both but on their own
terms. Among these were the pachucos. They took what they considered to be
“cool” from both cultures. Their main goal was having a good time. They came to
be associated with dances, nice clothes, music, cars, idling, drugs, and promiscuity.
To some extent, they were not alone in this respect since it was not they, alone, who
kept the Entertainment industry intact throughout the Depression years.
Based on his experience as an interpreter for the El Paso police court, Gabriel
Cordova believed that the pachuco dialect of calo originated with a group of youth
who congregated around the corner of Florence and 8
th
streets in El Paso. While it is
unlikely that this group alone would have created the language, they were among the

102

first to be known for using the dialect. Cordova claimed they were marijuana
peddlers and members of a gang called 7-X.
124

Edmundo Martinez Tostado, better known as Don Tosti, was also a youth
growing up in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso during the 1930s. He was a musician
and moved to Los Angeles around 1938. In Los Angeles he formed a band called
Don Totsi’s Pachuco Boogie Boys. He brought the use of the word tirili to Los
Angeles even though the word never really took hold as a label for pachucos outside
of El Paso and Juárez. His song “El Tirili” is an example of how Don Tosti brought
his El Paso version of pachuco culture to Los Angeles. The song demonstrates his
use of the word tirili as both a substitute for pachucos and marijuana (noun in the
form of a person, place or thing) as well as meaning “high” (noun in the form of an
abstract idea). Along with Don Tosti, many El Paso youths moved from El Paso to
Los Angeles and brought their pachuco culture with them. They lived in the same
neighborhoods with other El Pasoans in the Alpine barrio in the north side of
downtown, and brought a more Mexicanized version of pachuquismo to Los
Angeles. Many of these youth left to Los Angeles in the early 1940s and helped give
pachucos their name in Los Angeles. This stands in contrast to the Mexican
American zoot suiters of Los Angeles who were more influenced by African
Americans and the English language as historian Eduardo Pagan asserts.
125
Mexican

124
Gabriel Cordova, “Notes to Barker about El Paso Pachucos,” June 1948. George C. Barker
Collection, University of Arizona Special Collections, Southwest Folklore Center, Box 85-2/B-2,
folder 1/74.

103

American participants in Los Angeles zoot culture were not called pachucos, nor did
they call themselves pachucos, until the arrival of their El Paso counterparts. On the
other hand, youths from “El Chuco” were not referred to as pachucos either until
they arrived to Los Angeles.
In addition to Don Tosti, the story of Alberto Martinez, alias “Beto,” is
another example which sheds light on what it was like to be a teenager in El Paso
during the 1930s when pachuco culture was taking shape. Alberto’s father was a
federal soldier during the Mexican Revolution. He moved to El Paso and had
Alberto in 1928. Alberto would regularly go to elementary school barefoot, since he
only wore his shoes on weekends and on his birthday.
126

From his recollections we learn that after prohibition ended in 1933, the red
light district re-emerged in El Paso’s Chinese section of Segundo Barrio. Beto was
well acquainted with various people of color in El Paso. He explained that African
Americans could not go to downtown. Aside from Juárez hotels, it was only the
Chinese in El Paso who had hotels African Americans could frequent. African
Americans would also frequent Chinese restaurants and hotels with gambling,
Chinese lotteries, and prostitution. He also remembers some Mexicans married
African Americans. While African Americans left an indelible mark on Beto’s

125
Eduardo Obregon. Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

126
Anonymous, interview by Wendy S. Thompson, 8 April 1978, Interview 724, Institute of Oral
History, University of Texas at El Paso. Beto Martinez is a pseudonym.

104

memory, they constituted only 2% of El Paso’s population and therefore were not a
dominant influence in the city, nor Barrio Segundo.
Beto also remembered that there was a lot of smuggling across the border,
but in his estimation “it wasn’t bad. You could easily get across at that time.” One
of the products smuggled was marijuana, but he explained that everyone in the
neighborhood had beautiful gardens with flowers and many of those also grew
marijuana. But it wasn’t just for smoking, one of his aunts would rub her tired feet
in it with hot water, and it was also a cure for rheumatism. “Who ever thought they
would make it illegal?” Martinez said in 1978 when he was interviewed.
Beto’s teenage years illuminate the context in which pachuco culture
originated. He attended the segregated schools of the south side and attended high
school for a year and a half until the age of 15 when he dropped out. During his
teenage years he was frequently arrested by El Paso police. The city had a 10
o’clock curfew for minors, strictly enforced in Segundo Barrio. There were many
Fridays and Saturdays that he was arrested and kept in jail until Monday morning
when he would be released to go to school. Minors that were not enrolled in school
were sent to reform school. Soon Beto got to know all the police: Rascon, Baeza,
Luz, and Chivo. They would go to the south side and arrest youth just for being
outside, even if they were right outside their own house. Beto explained, “At that

105

time, you didn’t know your rights or nothing. ... You just got arrested and that’s
it.”
127

At the age of 15, Beto had a job as a paperboy that allowed him the income to
be outside of his house often. This was also the age in which he decided to run away
from home and hop on a train to California. En route, he and his friends that
accompanied him were caught by Border Patrol agents in New Mexico close to the
Arizona state line. These border agents first beat the boys and then asked them if
they were “wetbacks.” Once the agents determined the youths were Americans, they
left them stranded near a small town. Eventually Beto made his way to California
and to Los Angeles, where he became a full-fledged pachuco zoot suiter nicknamed
Diablo (Devil). Beto joined a gang of El Paso youths in Los Angeles, got into many
fights, and took part in the Zoot Suit Riots. As far as he was concerned, the Riots
occurred because,
sailors got mad because the girls didn’t want to dance with them. They wanted to
dance with the jitterbug guys, you know, the zoot-suiters—nice fancy clothes and
everything. That’s what actually started it between the Marines and the zoot suiters.

Beto was in Los Angeles from 1941-43, age 15-17. In 1943 he returned to El
Paso where, with his experience with “authentic” pachucos, he organized his own
gang. He fought with Puerto Ricans stationed at Fort Bliss, with other Mexican
American gang members from Segundo Barrio, and with Mexicans from Juárez.
The details of Beto’s experiences after the Zoot Suit Riots are discussed further in
the last chapter of this dissertation.

127
Ibid., 10.

106

As a counterpart to Beto’s 1930s El Paso experience, were the experiences of
a young man growing up right across the border in Ciudad Juárez during the same
decade. The life story of Germán Genaro Cipriano Gómez-Valdés Castillo, a
fourteen year old boy, can help elucidate the cultural influences permeating Juárez
and El Paso in the early 1930s that led to the increasing prominence of pachuco
culture. In 1931, Germán’s father, Rafael Valdés, moved his family from
Guadalajara in the Mexican interior to Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border
where Mr. Valdés got a job as supervisor of Mexican customs at the border
entrance.
128

Shortly after arriving to Ciudad Juárez the Juarense manner of speaking
rubbed off on Germán and his eight siblings. Juarense talk was considered to have a
drawl, arrastradita, and included occasional words in English. Their familiarity
with the English language was also enhanced by the English-language radio station
they would listen to in the afternoons. The radio station was broadcast from El Paso
and played “band music,” followed by a show called From the Border. This show
included music by the Andrews Sisters, instrumental bands, and local news by a disk
jockey with improper-Americanized Spanish.
129
Germán recalled the show would
sometimes mention “los del Chuco” (those from El Paso) and the “tirilones de la
coyotera” (the smuggling reefers). The dj would accuse them of crossing the border

128
Valdés, Rosalia. La Historia Inedita De Tin Tan: Editorial Planeta, 2005. 23.

129
ibid., 25.

107

back and forth to rob and commit acts of violence. On one occasion he recalled a
conversation about the topic with his family.
“Tirilones de la Coyotera?” asked Pedro, Germán’s younger brother.
“What is that dad” added Armando, another brother younger than Pedro
“A gang of vagos (bums)” Mr. Valdés responded.
“They are in the Miguel Hidalgo colonia, that is why you should never go
there.”
“And what do they do dad?” Germán asked
“No te hagas Germáncito,” (Don’t act innocent little Germán) “you yourself
told me the other day that you thought you saw one of them yanking ‘la
salpicadera’(parts) from a car to turn them into what they call ‘escupets.”
“Ay, papa” Germán argued, “those escupets can’t harm anyone. They have
bullets, but they shoot them with rubber bands.”
“See how you did know?” retorted Mr. Valdés

Since Germán noticed his brother Armando getting scared he decided to make a
joke. “Enough Germán!” Rafael interrupted and continued, “They have nothing
decent about them, they are violent and rebellious. So be very careful about bad
influences.”
130

This discussion reveals a few facts about these precursors of pachuco culture.
In 1931 they were already well known in Juárez, but were referred to as tirilis,
meaning marijuana smokers. They were also associated with “la Coyotera” or
smuggling across the border. Furthermore, even though Germán tried to play dumb
with his father, Germán was well aware of the tirilis’ illegal activities and probably
familiar with both tirilis and their weapons since he downplayed the severity of their
stealing auto parts to make their makeshift guns. Knowledge of tirili activity was not
limited to the youth, as Germán’s father Rafael was not only familiar with tirilis

130
ibid., 26. The conversation was in Spanish. It was translated by the author to English.

108

through his job, but also knew the Juárez neighborhood tirilis were easiest to find in
(His reference to the Miguel Hidalgo colonia). Germán and his siblings were also
instructed in no uncertain terms they were to avoid the bad cultural influence of the
tirilis. It is also likely that Mr. Valdés knew much more about the tirilis but did not
share the information with his young children.
Despite his particular circumstances, Germán’s partaking in the cultures of
both sides of the international boundary were not unique. Some Sundays, Germán
and his sixteen year old sister “Nena” would go to the border and wait for their father
to get off work. While they waited they enjoyed watching all the people crossing the
border into Mexico. Germán was not alone paying attention to how Texan-Mexican
young women were dressed as they entered Mexico wearing their slacks, considered
the latest in youth fashion at the time. Germán stopped going to school and focused
his energies on playing soccer where he was nicknamed Chiva (goat), one of the
many aliases he would have in his life. He also started crossing the border to see the
young women who frequented the clothing warehouses in El Paso.
131
Intercultural
exchanges on both sides of the border and nicknames amongst the working class
were common.
Upon hearing the news of Germán’s school absences his family forced him to
get a job. Soon Germán found himself a full time job with a Juárez electric company
as an inspector. His job was to drive around Juárez, look for houses stealing
electricity through illegal wire connections, and give them a written notice of the

131
ibid., 29.

109

violation. On his very first day, however, he learned that some homeowners would
both promise to get their electricity legally and pay him not to cut off their power. It
was not long before Germán started to venture into El Paso to offer his services.
After finishing his shift in Juárez at 4p.m. he would cross into El Paso where the
Mexican families who lived extremely close to the border could not resist the
temptation to have their electric cables connected illegally (possibly to Mexican
sources) and avoid paying their bill. Germán made a lot of money during this period
as an “inspector.”
132

This experience in El Paso led Germán to learn one of the possible origins of
the words Chuco and Pachuco. Germán believed that the word “chuco” came from
the word “chueco.” El Paso had so many illegal or “chueco” connections, that
people started calling it that. El Chuco is also what those that crossed the border to
work in the U.S. called El Paso. “Vamonos pa’l Chuco!” (Lets go to El Paso) he
would hear people say.
133
“Pachuco” evolved from “pa’l Chuco,” which is short for
“Lets go to El Paso.” In the late 1930s and early 1940s many Tucson and Los
Angeles residents would also similarly say that El Paso got its nickname from people
saying “Vamos pa’l Chuco” but this reference makes more sense for people coming
from Juárez and Mexico, than to those in other cities of the Southwest. It was Juárez
residents or Mexican immigrants who were most likely to reference going to El
Chuco, the most trafficked entry point for Mexicans during the first half of the

132
ibid., 30.

133
ibid., 31.

110

twentieth century. Hence Mexicans gave El Paso its nickname “El Chuco,” not
Mexican Americans or Mexicans already in the U.S.
Germán’s family regularly sat together for dinner. On one of those
occasions, Mr. Valdés started an insightful conversation with Germán,
Mr. Valdés: What is this Rafael (Germán’s brother) says that you believe you are a
zoot suiter?
Germán: I don’t think, dad, I am a zoot suiter
...
Mr. Valdés: And what is a zoot suiter?
[Germán left the table and returned with a very big suit in his hands.]
Germán: a suiter,
[Germán explained while he put on his hat]
Germán: is a pachuco, someone born here [Mexico] but lives there [U.S.]
[he put on the coat and a chain,]
Germán: someone who feels good there or here and dresses differently
[he put on a wide tie,]
Germán: someone from both sides, dad.
Mr. Valdés: Are you someone from both sides?
Germán: They never stop me on the bridge. When I cross, the Americans
greet me and let me pass, they know you are my dad... I’ve talked to
them about you. They know me now, they know I don’t do anything
bad, they let me come and go. Sometimes when I take my ball, I stop,
kick it toward them, they return it and laugh. Later they check what I
got and I say goodbye to them in English. I would say that I am from
both sides.
Mr. Valdés: Germán, you will no longer go to that job with the electric.... You
don’t want to study? You are going to get a real job. That is all, you
can all leave.
134

In the mid-1930s, while in his late teens, Germán embodied some of the
characteristics that would characterize pachucos in later years like dropping out of
school, an interest in fashion particularly the zoot suit, and regularly mixing Mexican
and American culture while creating their own. He also practiced the working class

134
ibid., 34-37. Translation from Spanish by author. Italicized words were in English in the original.

111

custom of giving everyone a nickname (Ger at home and Chiva by his friends).
Germán in 1934, also manifested some characteristics unique when compared
to Mexican Americans in the Southwest, but that were common in Juárez. For
example, Germán identified as being “from both sides” from Mexico and the U.S
even though he had never lived in the U.S. Juárez youth were accustomed to hearing
the use of English from American merchants, tourists, and the radio. Many of them
also went “pa’l Chuco” to work temporarily, some on a daily basis and therefore had
to learn some degree of English. By living so close to the international boundary,
they were comfortable crossing back and forth physically and culturally. The fact
that they self-identified as “Mexican Americans” without ever having lived in the
U.S. is relevant to Chicano historiography and borderlands studies.
Germán’s father asked his friend to give his son a job. His friend, Pedro
Meneses was the owner of the XEJ radio station. XEJ was reportedly the first
commercial radio station in the city as well as the first Spanish language radio station
on the Mexican side of the El Paso/Juárez border. The year was now 1934 and Mr.
Meneses gave the 18 year old Germán a job. He worked doing miscellaneous chores
around the radio station including mopping and putting labels on discs and tapes.
135

On one memorable occasion, Germán was anxious to finish his work preparing the
discs a deejay would play for a program of Mexican country ranchera music so that
he could see a swing band from California perform live. He could not help but

135
Valdés, 38-40.

112

follow the rhythm of the swing music with his fingers as the band played
Chatanooga Choo Choo to the style of Glen Miller.
136

More memorable than the swing band, was the day Germán’s artistic talent
was discovered by Meneses. Germán got to work early that day and was instructed
to clean the deejay cabin before the 8 a.m. program. He cleaned the instruments and
proceeded to sing a song in English.
137

I don’t know why I love you like I do,
I don’t know why but I do,
I don’t know why you treat me like you,
I don’t know why but it’s true.
You never seem...
Germán followed the song by playing the role of a deejay in Spanish. During his
skit, Meneses entered and witnessed Germán Valdés introducing and imitating a
popular Mexican singer named Agustin Lara. Soon thereafter, Meneses offered
Germán an opportunity to disk jockey live on the radio. Germán’s debut skit was an
elaboration of what Mr. Meneses had surprised him performing, an imitation of a
deejay and Agustin Lara singing. That was the first of many programs.
138
Most of
his radio performances emanated from his initial imitation of Agustin Lara, and
hence the similarity in the names of the personalities he played: Agustin Lara, Tintin
Larara, Augusto Larin, Topillo Tapas, and eventually Tin Tan.

136
Valdes, 40-42.

137
ibid., 44-45.

138
ibid., 46-48.

113

Because of Germán’s tendency to include words in English in his
performances, Mr. Meneses renamed Germán, Topillo Tapas. Meneses explained
that his manner of speaking was common along the border, especially in El Paso by
Mexicans who adopted the habit of calling things by their name in English, while
still being able to understand each other mostly in Spanish. But Germán however,
took the occasional use of English to another level by combining the two languages
to a greater extent. Germán, in Meneses’ view was a “topillero,” a rhetorical
trickster.
139

In mixing of both languages to such an extent, German became one of the
first known speakers of Spanglish. More than the Anglicizing of some Spanish
words, the use of improper cognates, or the use of English in Mexico, he was one of
the first documented individuals to turn both languages into a complete means of
communication of its own. He was surely not the first person to speak Spanglish, but
he is likely the first to bring Spanglish to a wide audience via the medium of radio.
Germán read the newspaper El Juarense every morning before work so that
he could be up to date with world events, hollywood stars, and his fascination with
the Chicago mobster underworld. This interest of his is emblematic of the pachuco
fascination with infamous American mobsters of the time.
Germán developed a relationship with a young woman from El Paso named
Micaela, and nicknamed Mickey, who helped Germán improve his English. A
recounting of one night the two went out dancing serves as a narrative to illustrate

139
ibid., 49.

114

some of the cultural dynamics taking place in El Paso during the late 1930s and early
1940s. She introduced him to her parents in Spanglish and Germán discovered that
her parents preferred not to speak Spanish, despite the fact that their English was far
from perfect. “Papá, mom, this is Jerry (yet another nickname for Germán). He
proceeded to ask in his newly refined English, “We just want to know if we could go
dancing. Is it ok with you? Micaela then introduced her grandmother and Germán
greeted her first in Spanish and then in English. “Como esta, senora? Very nice to
meet you.” The grandmother told Germán not to talk to her in English, she
explained that she was from Chihuahua and was just visiting. With the parent’s
permission they went to a dance hall in El Paso called Paradise of the Army. The
year was 1942 and they played live swing music until they closed at midnight. The
couple danced four boogie-woogies in a row, which was followed by a romantic
song.
Germán continued to successfully perform on the Juárez radio station XEJ
but his popularity exploded after 1942 when he was given the creative space on a
new program called “El barco de la ilusion” (the Ship of Illusions). On this new
program he was able to play several roles including el Muerto Morido (the Dead
Dead-guy), el Marinero Tobias (Tobias the Marine), and most importantly for the
record of pachuco culture was his role as the “tirilon” (marijuana smoker) “Topillo
Tapas.” His boss Meneses had a zoot suit made for Germán with the tailor at “la
casa Rosens de Juárez.” The Ship was the biggest hit in Juárez for about a year. The
live studio was always full with audience members. Right before the first

115

anniversary of the program, Paco Miller and his company executives attended a live
performance of Germán’s. At the end of the night, Miller invited Germán to work
for his performance company and go on tour with them since his company needed a
new comedian. They were in Juárez on their way to their next performance at the
Teatro Colon in El Paso. Miller enjoyed Germán’s use of Spanglish. Miller
explained that what he found funniest about Germán’s performance was when he
referred to the fixeo (fixing) and the likeo (leak) of the buque (ship) of the Illusion.
Ultimately, Germán left XEJ to go on tour with Miller across the U.S. West Coast.
140

Valdés took the route of the pachuco, from Juárez to El Paso, to Tucson and Los
Angeles.
CONCLUSION
Because of the Mexican Revolution and the local migration from Juárez it
spurred, El Paso had a large cohort of Mexican Americans by the 1920s and 1930s.
With a Mexican American majority came the predominance of Mexican American-
specific cultural manifestations, of which pachuquismo was one. On the other hand,
in Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Antonio, Mexican Americans did not become a
majority of the ethnic Mexican population until the 1930s and 1940s a decade after
El Paso. The 1910s gave impetus to smuggling networks of weapons and arms from
El Paso to Juárez. During the 1920s these established smuggling networks increased
their trafficking and smuggling, but now in both directions. In unprecedented
numbers, Americans went into Juárez for alcohol, music, and sex. Mexicans too,

140
Valdés, 55-57.

116

immigrated into the United States in unprecedented and unparalleled proportions
during the 1920s. The children of the 1910s immigrants to El Paso made up the new
majority (or at least a sizable segment) within the ethnic Mexican community by the
early 1930s.
It is during the early 1930s that the first pachucos made their presence felt in
both Juárez and El Paso. Juárez is typically absent from the origins story of pachuco
culture as are “Mexican Americans” like Germán Valdés. These youths went on to
influence, and be influenced by, youths in Tucson and Los Angeles as the following
chapters demonstrate. Ultimately, pachuco culture did appear in El Paso and Ciudad
Juárez before anywhere else. There were also many cultural precursors, such as
tirilis, in the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez area that led to the creation of pachuco
culture. Pachucos from El Paso created their own version of pachuquismo which
was very different from the typical version that is associated with Los Angeles
during World War II. El Chuco’s version of the culture, which spread to places like
Tucson, was primarily associated with ethnic Mexicans from El Paso, marijuana,
pachuco caló, and smuggling.

117

CHAPTER 3: MEXICAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN TUCSON

This chapter on Mexican and Native American Tucson is not so much a
continuation of the preceding chapter on El Paso and Juarez, as it is a chronological
parallel. During the 1930s and early 1940s Tucsonense youth learned about the El
Paso version of pachuco culture and created a variant. The meaning of pachuco
culture that came from El Paso to Tucson was one that associated pachucos with
ethnic Mexicans from El Paso, marijuana, pachuco caló, and border smuggling. In
Tucson, pachucos came to be associated primarily with pachuco caló, the poor, and
some Native Americans. Tucson was also the site of origin of the cross tattoo that
later came to be identified with pachucos everywhere. Nevertheless, prior to the
Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, even in Tucson, pachuco culture was associated primarily
with El Paso. Before the Riots, pachuco culture was spread primarily through the
circuitous movement of people between Mexico via the Ciudad Juarez and El Paso
entry point, Tucson as a midway point, and Los Angeles.
Mexican immigration to the U.S. Southwest surged during the 1920s. The
primary point of entry continued to be through the Ciudad Juarez and El Paso Texas
border crossing. While ethnic Mexicans continuously inhabited several cities since
they belonged to Mexico, the new immigrants that arrived between 1910 and 1930
had the effect of burgeoning the number of Mexicans in existing locations and
culturally Mexicanizing ethnic Mexican neighborhoods. By 1930 El Paso, Texas
and Los Angeles, California were among the top three cities with the greatest

118

number of Mexicans. Their numbers grew to such an extent that there were more
Mexicans in these U.S. cities than in any city in the country of Mexico, with the
exception of Mexico City itself.
The Southern Pacific Railroad was the primary means of traveling from the
border crossing in El Paso/Juarez to Los Angeles, California. Before the Great
Depression, most of the migrating along this route was from Mexico towards Los
Angeles. During the early and mid 1930s most of the repatriation was from Los
Angeles towards Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua Mexico. By the late 1930s the flow of
migrants went back and forth although by the early 1940s, the trend was greater
heading west again.
Mexican immigrants brought their culture to the Southwest and did their best
to recreate the lifestyle of their homeland. As immigrants visited and resided in
different parts of the Southwest, they came in contact with Mexicans from states
other than their own, and with various local demographics and customs. Most
Mexicans that immigrated to the Los Angeles came through Ciudad Juarez and El
Paso. In both places they came in contact with Americans, Mexican Americans, and
their respective cultures which differed from their own. The longer they stayed in
the U.S. the more they learned American culture such as the English language and
business practices. The longer they stayed the more they resembled Mexican

119

Americans with actions such as creating pochismos of their own and living in the
same segregated sections of town.
141

Knowledge of both pachuco culture and the predecessors of pachuco culture,
such as the tirili, was spread by immigrants who resided in El Paso and Ciudad
Juarez for varying lengths of time before migrating to other sections of the
Southwest. The version of pachuco culture that came from the border was one which
associated pachucos ethnically with Mexican Americans, linguistically with the
pachuco calo dialect, musically with both Jazz of the 1920s and 1930s as well as
Mexican corridos from the 1910s to the 1940s. They were also criminally associated
with border smuggling and marijuana. Even though Juarez was instrumental in the
formation of the tirili and pachuco culture, El Paso was the primary place pachuco
culture was associated with.
George C. Barker was an anthropologist who conducted research with the
ethnic Mexican community in Tucson from 1945 to 1951. Several of his
interviewees confirmed that pachuco calo was spoken in Tucson during the early
1930s and that it had originated in the El Paso-Juarez area among underworld grifos.
Grifos, is a calo term for marijuana smokers. More specifically, a graduate student
and court interpreter in El Paso named Gabriel Cordoba told Barker that he believed
the dialect of pachuco calo had originated with the members of the 7-X gang, a
group of marijuana peddlers who congregated in the vicinity of Florence and 8
th

Street in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso. They also asserted that the language was

141
Pocho is the Mexican word for Mexican American. Pochismo is a Mexican term for Americanized
Spanish expressions.

120

primarily spread by young single men who migrated along the route of the Southern
Pacific railroad.
142

Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero was born to Mexican parents in Tucson where he
was raised. He ultimately became a musician and the most renowned musical
chronicler of the Mexican American experience from the 1930s to the 1970s. He
recalled learning pachuco calo as a teenager when he worked in a Tucson bakery in
1933. He learned it from a group of pachucos who came from El Paso and worked
temporarily in Tucson until they could make enough money to continue their trek
toward Los Angeles.
Additional support for these theories, include knowledge of a group of
pachucos that were kicked out of El Paso by police who warned them they would
receive prison sentences if they ever returned to El Paso.
143
These youths left El
Paso by “hopping freights,” that is, they illegally rode freight trains as their primary
means of traveling. While this incident took place in 1942, it is still indicative of the
association of pachucos with El Paso and the role of the railroad in facilitating their
destinations, which were both present long before 1942. Pablo T., a young Mexican
American interviewee who lived in Tucson during the 1940s shared with Barker the
fact that his father-in-law knew more pachuco calo than Pablo because his father-in-

142
Barker, George Carpenter. "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in
Tucson, Arizona." Social Science bulletin; no. 18; University of Arizona Bulletin Series; v. 21, no. 1;
(1950): 21-22.

143
Barker, 22.

121

law grew up in El Paso while the youth had been raised on the Anglo side of a border
town where he had little association with ethnic Mexicans and pachucos.
144

While Tucsonense youth learned about pachuco culture from El Paso, they
created their own unique version of the culture. For example, while the marijuana
and ethnic Mexican associations from El Paso were still present, they were not as
prevalent in the Tucson understanding of pachucos. Instead, liquor and Native
Americans played a much larger role. The smuggling aspect of El Paso pachuco
culture was also much more diminished in the Tucson version, although a similar
form of that aspect continued as they were sometimes considered unproductive “lazy
bums.”
The largest Native American group in Tucson during the 1940s was the
Tohono O’ Odhom. They were descendants of the indigenous group who inhabited
the area before it became part of United States, Mexico, or New Spain. There is
some evidence of Tohono, Yavapai, and Apache pachucos, or at least association
with pachucos.
145
They were known to be poor and remembered as among the very
first pachucos in Tucson. They were identified primarily by their language use of
caló before zoot suits became popular in the early 1940s.
146
On one occasion, Barker
ran into a group of pachucos cruising through the Tohono O’Odhom reservation a

144
Barker, George Carpenter. "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in
Tucson, Arizona." Social science bulletin; no. 18; University of Arizona Bulletin Series; v. 21, no. 1;
(1950): 30-31.

145
Cummings, Laura Lee. "Que Siga El Corrido: Tucson Pachucos and Their Times." University of
Arizona, 1994. 68-69.

146
Cummings, 70, 81, 91.

122

dozen miles south of Tucson.
147
While the Tohono O’ Odhom where the largest
indigenous group in the Tucson area, their distance from downtown and the ethnic
Mexican barrios also limited their association with pachucos.
Of all the Native American groups in the Tucson area, it was the Yaqui who
were most likely to have had regular interaction with Mexican Americans because
they were the only Native American group with a concentrated residential
community in close proximity to Mexican American neighborhoods. The Yaqui
“village” of Pascua shared borders and some residents with Barrio Adelanto,
Hollywood, Anita and Blue Moon which were connected to other Mexican
neighborhoods in Tucson.
Compared to the Tohono O’ Odhom who were the most numerous and had
been in the Tucson area for centuries, Yaqui Indians were numerically much smaller
and began to arrive to the area during the late nineteenth century. They migrated to
Tucson Arizona from the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora because of
Mexican encroachment on their native homeland. The Yaqui, and others such as the
Mayo Indians, were pushed out of Sonora by a genocidal war waged by the Mexican
government against them in the 1880s.
148
Pascua, just north of Tucson, was one of
the refugee colonies that the Yaqui created after leaving Mexico.
149
The Yaqui have

147
Barker, 28.

148
Sheridan, Thomas E. Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941. Tucson &
London: University of Arizona Press, 1992. 105. To learn more, see Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole.
"Made by Violence: Chicana Narrative and the Remaking of the World, 1851-1996." Ph.D. Diss,
Cornell University, 2004.

149
Pascua Village was officially founded in 1903.

123

worked to maintain their cultural heritage since their arrival. They also held a unique
circumstance in that they were simultaneously Mexican nationals, Native Americans,
and devout Christians.
In the 1880s ethnic Mexicans were still the majority of the population, but
with the arrival of the Southern Pacific railroad that decade came greater numbers of
Anglos and racial segregation. The tracks of the Southern Pacific railroad physically
and socially divided Tucson into the northeast and the southwest. Although Tucson
was not the most popular destination in the West, the railroad brought more Anglo
migrants from the East and Midwest; therein began the segregation of Tucson into
two main halves.
The new Anglo migrants were attracted by the healthful climate of Tucson to
vacation and retire. The University of Arizona was founded in the mid 1880s on the
east side of Tucson, and as the student population and the number of Anglos
residents on the east side grew, property values increased to such an extent that
ethnic Mexicans were increasingly pressured to move out into the west or south side
of Tucson toward the Santa Cruz River.
150
By 1889 Tucson grew to 10,000 and it
was during the following two decades that the ethnic Mexican population came to
constitute less than 50 per cent of the Tucson population for the first time.
151
Ethnic
Mexicans increasingly lived South and West of the railroad tracks which divided
Tucson diagonally while Anglos lived on the northeast side of the tracks.

150
Officer, James E. "Barriers to Mexican Integration in Tucson." The Kiva 17, no. 1-2 (1951), 21.

151
Sheridan estimates this happened during the 1910s.

124

Figure 2: Tucson Neighborhoods
152

152
Sheridan, 238. Numbers and words in bold were digitally enhanced by author.

125

While the Yaqui moved to the area in the 1880s, Pascua village was officially
founded in 1903 when it was still physically separate from both Anglo and ethnic
Mexican Tucson. By the 1940s, however, Pascua came to share a border with the
ethnic Mexican barrio Adelanto, located on the northwestern edge of Tucson. It was
between seventy five and ninety nine percent ethnic Mexican in 1940.
Geographically, this community was most likely to have had regular interaction with
Native American Yaquis from Pascua. In 1940 four residential blocks in Adelanto
were only fifty percent ethnic Mexican, they were most likely inhabited by Yaquis.
The northwest side of Tucson also included the El Rio, Hollywood, and Anita barrios
which similarly consisted of overwhelming ethnic Mexican majorities.
153
El Rio and
Hollywood, along with being new barrios, were economically better off than the
older barrios closer to downtown.
154

The names Yaquis gave to their villages are indicative of the prominence of
the Catholic religion to Yaqui identity. A Yaqui village near Phoenix, Arizona was
called Guadalupe, the Mexican Marian apparition. Pascua in Tucson, is named the
Spanish word for Easter, after the most important annual Christian holiday.
Along with proximity to ethnic Mexican barrios came interactions and the
prospect of intercultural influences.

153
Hollywood is slightly east of El Rio. Anita was south of Adelanto, east of both El Rio and
Hollywood. All three barrios were 75-100% ethnic Mexican according to Sheridan’s research of the
city directory. According to Barker, Barrio Belen, was adjoining to the village of Pascua. This was a
new barrio in the late 1940s between Adelanto and Pascua that was eventually consumed by
Adelanto. Barker, 17.

154
Barker, 17.

126

Along with the centrality of Christianity to Yaqui identity were many
traditional native dances and rituals. Yaqui Pascola dancers, for example, painted or
etched crosses on the forehead or chin of their ceremonial masks.
155
Yaqui
ceremonial Chapayeka masks also had a cross on the inside where it touched the
forehead. Many interviewees recalled pachucos in Tucson who tattooed a cross on
their face, either on the forehead above an eyebrow, or on the chin below the bottom
lip just like these Yaqui ceremonial masks. This unique placement of the tattoo was
exclusive to Tucson pachucos.
156
According to anthropologist Murial Painter,
Pascolas and Chapayekas needed protection because they were in liminal spaces
between good and evil.
157
Mexican American pachucos wore cross charms and
tattooed crosses for protection from harm and evil as well, and they are similarly said
to be in between worlds, the Mexican and American. Eventually the tattoo of the
cross became emblematic of pachucos everywhere as it became more popular to
have the tattoo of the cross on the hand between the thumb and forefinger.
Rebecca Tapia, Director of the Pascua Neighborhood Center, substantiated
this assertion when she shared the following information in 2007. She explained that
the tattoo of the cross in general, but its specific use in the face in particular, could
have originated with the Yaqui because Pascola masks play an important role in
Yaqui historical culture and because the masks have what appear to be crosses in the

155
Cummings, 82 and 92.

156
ibid., 82.

157
Painter, Muriel Thayer. With Good Heart: Yaqui Beliefs and Ceremonies in Pascua Village. Edited
by Edward H. Spicer and Wilma Kaemlein. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986.

127

same places Yaqui pachucos were known to have them in, on the forehead and chin.
She also explained that before the arrival of Christianity, Yaquis would refer to the
sun when speaking of God because it was believed the creator lived in/on the Sun,
although they did not have a specific word for the creator. For example, they would
refer to Father Sun and Mother Moon. The pascola masks have a sun symbol on the
forehead with lines, dots, or triangles representing the radiating light of the sun.

Figure 3: Yaqui Pascola Mask
158

While there are still pascola masks with the sun symbol, many of the
Christian-era-made masks have a cross with the same lines, dots, or triangles
representing radiating light as if the cross was the sun. The cross on these masks is
found in the same spot of the mask, instead of the sun.
159

158
Photograph of Yaqui Pascola Mask taken by author October 16, 2007.

159
Personal conversation with Rebecca Tapia, Director of the Pascua Neighborhood Center on
October 16, 2007.

128

Figure 4: Pachuco Tattoo of the Cross
160

This tattoo of the cross is significant because it became the most famous
pachuco tattoo, and still automatically associated with pachucos to this day. This
tattoo is of a cross with at least two lines representing radiating light from the cross,
although in Los Angeles and El Paso the tattoo was always placed in the fore-thumb
instead of the forehead and chin like some Yaqui pachucos are recalled to have had
it. It is possible the cross with radiating light was first seen in the pascola masks of
the Yaqui (Yoeme) people in Tucson during the 1930s and 1940s, then on the Yaqui
pachucos, then on the pachucos of other places like Los Angeles and El Paso.
Without claiming the Yaqui invented the image of the cross with radiating light, I
argue that Yaqui religious practices influenced Yaqui pachucos to choose tattoos that
were culturally relevant to them. Mexican American cultural borrowings of the
tattoo placed on the fore-thumb seemed tame by comparison.

160
Image of the pachuco cross tattoo accessed from the FBI website on October 27, 2009.
www.fbi.gov/wanted/seekinfo/janedoeindiana.htm.

129

Figure 5: Most Popular Placement of Cross Tattoo
161

The modern Yaqui flag has both the cross and the rays of light, on the other
hand, the Arizona flag also has the rays of the sun in it. Many old Catholic figures
also had rays of light coming out of everything from the sacred heart, to the image of
Jesus Christ, and the holy ghost. But it was because the Catholic religion was so
important to the Yaquis that they officially intermixed it with their native traditions
and that the tattoo cross could have more likely have been a Yaqui contribution than
a Mexican American one.
Yaqui pachucos influenced Mexican American use of the tattoo of the cross.
Does this mean that Yaqui youth were influenced by ethnic Mexicans to appropriate
some aspects of pachuco culture? As Martha Menchaca argues in Recovering
History, Constructing Race, Native American groups in Tucson have a history of
“passing” for Mexican.
162
Some of this goes back to Native Americans attempting to
reap some of the perceived benefits from the rights that were supposed to be granted

161
Photograph of cross tattoo was taken by author April 24, 2005. Image was digitally enhanced
because it had faded after 57 years since its placement.

162
Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black and White Roots of
Mexican Americans, University of Texas Press, Austin. 2001.

130

to Mexicans by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the Gadsen Purchase
in 1854.
163
In a town that was majority Mexican throughout the nineteenth century,
Mexicans also looked down upon the local Native American groups which led some
to assimilate into local Mexican culture. This sentiment could also have been
reinforced by the prejudices against Native Americans, and the Yaqui in particular,
in the Mexican state of Sonora where many Tucsonenses had originated from as
well. In the 1930s, with Native American groups among the first to speak calo, it
may seem like they were again passing for something other than Native, although we
cannot claim with certainty whether they saw pachuco culture as “Mexican.” I argue
that the influences went both ways, Yaqui youth were among the first to learn about
the version of pachuco culture with ethnic Mexican associations that came from the
El Paso border region, yet they created their own version of pachuquismo. Local
ethnic Mexican youths also created their own version of pachuco culture, first by
incorporating Native American placement of the cross into their own variant, and
then by influencing both the Los Angeles and El Paso versions of pachuquismo.
The relationships between Yaqui from Pascua and the ethnic Mexicans from
northern Tucson were complex. Marcia Torres’ oral history helps explain this
relationship.
164
Her parents were Sonoran Yaquis that arrived to Pascua in the early
20
th
century. Her father, Mariano Torres, worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad
and kept his family either with him in labor camps or at Marcia’s grandparents’

163
Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race, 226, 252.

164
Torres, Marcia. Interview by author on October 16 2007. Marcia Torres is a pseudonym requested
by the interviewee.

131

house in Pascua. During the early 1930s, he was able to purchase property and build
a house on the southern end of Pascua. While Mr. and Mrs. Torres built a temporary
home at first, eventually, with the help of their teenage sons, they were able to build
a bigger home.
North of Pascua was nothing but alfalfa fields, as Marcia remembered. But
south of Pascua was the small and new barrio of Belen. This was one of the ethnic
Mexican majority neighborhoods close to Pascua, along with Barrio Adelanto and
Barrio Anita to the South; as well as Barrio Hollywood to the West.
165
As a child
Marcia recalled playing children’s games with her ethnic Mexican neighbors who
technically lived in Barrio Belen where it bordered with Pascua.
She started school at a one-room elementary school which eventually grew
into the now much larger Ritchie Elementary, named after Marcia’s teacher Mrs.
Ritchie. As early as “One-Room Ritchie,” Marcia attended school with Mexican
American children. After the first grade, she attended Davis Elementary School until
the sixth grade where she had many Mexican American classmates. She recalled
that some of her Yaqui peers would drop out in the 4
th
and 5
th
grade, but Marcia
persevered on to Roskruge Junior High until she graduated in the ninth grade. She
then began tenth grade at Tucson High School but chose not to continue because of
cultural differences. She really enjoyed her classes but felt too uncomfortable
dressing and undressing for gym class. She started having Anglo classmates at
Roskruge and they were the majority of her classmates by tenth grade at Tucson

165
Barrio Belen was enveloped by Barrio Adelanto.

132

High School. Mexican American classmates were the predominant group in
elementary school, the majority in Junior High, but a minority in high school. Yaqui
peers ceased to be a majority of her classmates since she left “One-Room Ritchie.”
Marcia recalled her grandfather spoke Yaqui exclusively. Her grandmother
spoke both Yaqui and Spanish. Her mother, who arrived to the U.S. at the age of
three, spoke fluent Yaqui, English and Spanish. Her father spoke Yaqui and Spanish
although he would read both of the daily newspapers, the one in English, and El
Tucsonense in Spanish. Marcia’s parents would speak to each other in Yaqui and to
their children in Spanish.
Marcia learned all three languages Yaqui, Spanish, and English; although not
in equal measures. Her siblings would talk to each other in Spanish. Marcia learned
to read Spanish at the age of eleven because her father would place her on his lap and
teach her while reading El Tucsonense. Her mother strongly encouraged her children
to learn English because it was necessary. She even prioritized it over the Yaqui
language. “Later, if you want to, you will learn it,” she reasoned.
166
Her mother
would also read the English language comic strips to Marcia and her siblings.
While Marcia’s closest friends during childhood were from the ethnic
Mexican neighborhood of Barrio Belen, during high school, her best friends were
from another ethnic Mexican neighborhood named Barrio Hollywood. This barrio
was farther from Pascua than Belen, but it was also in the northwest side of Tucson.
She found Mexican American females were nice to her and made good friends, but

166
Torres interview, “despues si ustedes quieren lo aprenden.”

133

the boys were generally mean to her. “Here come the Pascola dancers” and “here
come the Yaqui girls” are some of the negative comments Mexican American boys
would jeer at Marcia. When she ignored them, there were even times when they
pulled her hair, “they were kind of racist,” Marcia explained.
167
Racism takes on a
particular meaning when coming from Yaquis who came from Mexico where Native
Americans have been historically discriminated against and persecuted.
During her teens, Marcia’s parents did not allow her to attend dances but she
recalled going to house parties. The first time she ever danced, she remembered it
being with an ethnic Mexican boy. Her uncle played the violin for a popular band
that also included a guitar and bass. She specifically remembered the band had no
drums, and scant songs included lyrics. She referred to the genre of music the band
played as rancheras and polkas. Despite finding Mexican American boys generally
mean to her, ironically they were the only boys Marcia was ever interested in
romantically. As a single young adult, she worked in downtown Tucson at a retail
store called McClellan on Congress Street in Downtown Tucson where she met her
eventual husband. Although not a pachuco, her husband grew up in El Paso and his
family was from Chihuahua Mexico. Marcia recalled that Yaqui’s encouraged each
other to marry within their indigenous group. Despite the encouragement, however,
none of her sisters married Yaqui men. Marcia and one sister married ethnic
Mexican men. Her youngest sister married a Polish American man from
Massachusetts. Her oldest and youngest brothers, on the other hand, did marry

167
Marcia Torres’ exact statements were “Mira alli vienen las Pascolas,” “Alli vienen las Yaquis,”
and “Nos jalaban las trensas.”

134

Yaqui women. The second oldest was killed in the South Pacific before he could
marry an Australian woman he met there.
Regarding pachucos specifically, she recalled seeing many. The most
popular as she recalled were from Barrio Hollywood. Her younger sister really liked
that style and ultimately married a fantastic dancing pachuco. She recalled the cross
tattoo was very popular in the fore thumb. Young women would also get them. One
male cousin of hers was a tattoo artist. One sister tattooed her husband’s name in a
concealed location. Another relative of Marcia’s also got a tattoo that was still
visible in 2007 although it had faded significantly. None of her brothers were
pachucos.
Marcia recalled everything being great during her upbringing, that is, until
World War II hit. Three of her older brothers served in WWII. The second oldest
brother, Mariano Jr., did not wait to be drafted. He enlisted the morning after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor along with a couple of his friends. He turned 21 in
Australia where he got engaged but was killed by a sniper twelve days later. This
brother had been very popular amongst young women of all ethnicities in Tucson.
Upon learning of Mariano’s death, a younger brother enlisted in the military to
avenge his older brother’s slaying. Instead, he suffered a head injury at the age of 19
that ailed him for the rest of his life. He spent many years “hopping freights” after
he returned from the War.
The oldest of the three brothers did not volunteer because he was already
married with three children before the war, but he was drafted and sent to the South

135

Pacific just like his two brothers before him. Unfortunately, he too returned with
psychological problems resulting from the war that detrimentally affected him the
remainder of his life. Marcia explained that these Yaqui men who served their
country kept most of their horrifying experiences to themselves. One uncle of
Marcia’s, who served in North Africa during WWII, did share one of his traumatic
moments soon after returning to Tucson. He explained that on one occasion, his
entire squad was killed by German troops. After the slaughter, the attackers
approached to confirm the casualties and this uncle survived by digging himself
under his dead brothers in arms and pretending to be dead. Her eldest sister also
served in the war effort by enlisting herself in the Women’s Auxiliary Civilian
Service (WACS) in Tucson. Marcia was 14 years old in 1941, and for this reason
her pachuco memories are most relevant to the post Riots version of pachuco culture
than the pre Riots one. Her personal history, and her family’s service to their county,
reveals a complicated relationship between themselves, their neighbors, and their
country.
The Yaquis saw themselves as a distinct people with their own culture. Even
though they came from Mexico, because of their ill treatment by the Mexican
government, they did not identify as Mexican. In Pascua, they were surrounded by
ethnic Mexican neighborhoods by the 1940s and Yaqui children shared classrooms
with Mexican American children for most of their education. During young
adulthood, Yaqui youth had to navigate a complex multicultural world in terms of
friendships, romantic relationships, social gatherings, and classmates. In Marcia’s

136

case, she married an ethnic Mexican man even though intermarriage was
discouraged, and even though Mexican American males were generally mean to her
during her early teens. Both Yaqui and Mexican American youth participated in
pachuco culture although they were not identified as “Yaqui pachucos” or “Mexican
pachucos” specifically.
Pachuco culture before 1943 was spread primarily through the movement of
peoples. In addition to the relationships between Tucson and El Paso addressed
earlier in this chapter, several of George C. Barker’s interviewees during the mid
1940s expressed relationships with Los Angeles prior to 1943.
Enrique C., for example, was born in Tucson but lived in Boyle Heights in
1942 when he was 16 years of age. During his stay in Boyle Heights he lived with
relatives, attended Roosevelt High School, and worked in a baking company.
Enrique learned pachuco calo at work with his cousins who were not pachucos but
knew the pachuco vocabulary. Enrique came into contact with many pachucos but
he did not befriend them. In fact some pachucos teased him and his cousins for not
being pachucos by calling them “Pepsi-Cola kids.” After his stint in Boyle Heights,
Enrique returned to Tucson, finished high school, and entered the U.S. Army. His
language habits included speaking Spanish to his parents and sister, English and
Spanish with his friends, and occasionally speaking calo to his friends when he

137

wanted to amuse them.
168
Enrique is an example of the connections between Los
Angeles and Tucson prior to 1943.
Before 1943, pachuco culture in Tucson was primarily associated with El
Paso, pachuco calo, and some Native Americans. After the Zoot Suit Riots, the Los
Angeles version of pachuco culture predominated in Tucson, even though it
coexisted with the local variant of the culture. Enrique C. learned about the Los
Angeles version of pachuco culture which was more closely associated with African
Americans and the zoot suit. He was interviewed in Tucson after the Riots, so he
cashed in on his experience in Los Angeles by amusing his friends with his
knowledge of pachuco calo. Barker’s reference to Enrique’s short stint in Los
Angeles is to demonstrate Enrique’s experience with “authentic” pachuquismo even
though pachuco calo was not an original Los Angeles influence to Tucson since they
already had calo in Tucson since the 1930s.
Barker interviewed about fifteen Tucson pachucos in the mid to late 1940s.
A few of them demonstrated how they learned about pachuco culture during the war
either by visiting other towns or in the service. Toro, a pachuco gang leader in the
mid 1940s, lived his whole life in Tucson except for his time in the Army when he
was based in both Los Angeles and New York City. Luey G., a member of Toro’s
gang, helps explain the spread of pachuco culture further.
169
He was 19 when Barker
interviewed him and also lived in a Tucson barrio. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at

168
Barker, Pachuco, 30.

169
ibid., 27.

138

age 16 and spent one year and one half in Germany with the U.S. Occupation Army.
Luey spoke English, Spanish, German, and pachuco calo. He claimed to have
learned pachuco calo from other Spanish-Speaking “boys” in the army.
170
Luey’s
experience adds credence to the notion that Pachuco culture was spread across the
U.S. Southwest through migration before the war, and through military service
during the war.
Pete R. was another native of Tucson. He was age 20 when Barker
interviewed him in the mid to late 1940s. He dropped out of high school to work as
a miner. While he did not confirm he learned pachuco culture elsewhere, he did
confirm making trips to both Los Angeles and El Paso.
171

Rudy J. “Tack” was a member of another pachuco gang.
172
For some
undisclosed reason, Barker identified Rudy as a “model pachuco.” Perhaps it was
because of the ducktail hairstyle he wore, or the extent of pachuco calo he knew, or
because after the Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles was associated with being THE place
to find pachucos and Rudy had been to California. Although he learned much of his
calo on Congress Street in Tucson, by the late 1940s Rudy had the advantage, and
prestige, of also having learned some calo in California during a 3 month trip in

170
Barker, 27.

171
ibid.

172
ibid., 28.

139

which he worked as a celery picker in Southern California and on airplanes in San
Jose, a northern California city.
173

The Mexican American musician Lalo Guerrero was born in Tucson where
he performed during the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this period, he primarily
sang in the Mexican genres of corridos, rancheras, polkas. While Guerrero wrote
many songs in Tucson, it was not until he started frequenting Los Angeles in the
early 1940s that he began recording his compositions. During his early years in Los
Angeles, he continued with the Tucson group, Los Carlistas. His first recordings
with Vocalion Records in 1939 were all in Spanish and included the genres of
corrido, huapango, comic, fox trot, corrida, ranchera, and ballad. All of these genres
reflected a strong Latin American influence in his repertoire.
One Latin American influence in particular was Agustin Lara. Lara was a
Mexican singer who made an indelible impression on pachuco influenced musicians
despite the fact that he did not record anything pachuco-themed. Lara had major key
tonality, played guitar and piano, and sang mostly romantic songs. While Lara is not
an obvious influence because of his piano playing and romantic lyrics, his music
spoke to the womanizing, smooth-talking aspect of pachuco culture which is
discussed further in the next chapter. Both Lalo Guerrero and German Valdes “Tin
Tan” (addressed in the El Paso chapters) began their careers with explicit references

173
Barker, 28. Congress Street was in Downtown Tucson and is also the eponym for Barrio
Congreso.

140

to Lara. Guerrero recalled Lara as his idol in the 1930s and the first solo record
Guerrero recorded was a song written by Lara called Pecadora.
174

While the El Paso version of pachuco culture influenced the Tucson version,
it was also influencing the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture. Just like
Guerrero began making regular trips to Los Angeles to help his musical career.
Edmundo Tostado, better known as Don Tosti and introduced in the last chapter, was
another musician who went to Los Angeles, but from El Paso. Tostado was raised in
the Segundo Barrio section of El Paso where pachuco calo was first identified.
Tostado arrived to Los Angeles in time to finish his high school and continue his
musical education. He was an active participant in the local Los Angeles Jazz scene
during the 1940s. By the late 1940s, he recorded several pachuco themed songs that
acknowledged his association of pachucos with El Paso.
By the early 1940s, Los Angeles had developed its own version of pachuco
culture. The Los Angeles version of pachuco culture was heavily influenced by the
world of Jazz and the predominantly African American Central Avenue jazz scene.
The pachucos that subscribed to this version of pachuco culture were less likely to
practice pachuco calo, and more likely to be familiar with the jive slang of the Jazz
world. This is the case of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants that Eduardo O. Pagan has
studied and analyzed.
175
They called their zoot suits “drapes” and they did not see
their style as a particularly ethnic Mexican one despite the fact that a majority of the

174
Guerrero, Lalo. Lalo: My Life and Music. 53, 196.

175
Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

141

youth who wore zoot suits in Los Angeles were Mexican American youth. The fact
that pachuco culture in Los Angeles included much less use of pachuco calo and
much more jazz jive, is one of the indicators that calo spoken in Tucson did not come
from Los Angeles. The use of jive which was based on the English language, is also
indicative of the multiracial and multiethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as
Boyle Heights, downtown Los Angeles, and Watts. This stands in contrast to
pachuco calo in Tucson and El Paso which was based on the Spanish language and
came from communities where the Spanish language predominated.
Alex B was born and raised in Los Angeles California where he was a
pachuco while attending junior high school in Watts. He described his pachuco
years as age 14 to 17 and Watts as a neighborhood that was shared by African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans. As an explanation for his pachuco involvement he
explained “You’re a square” if one did not belong to a gang because of the extent of
peer pressure. His parents and brothers disapproved of his “wearing drapes.” Being
a pachuco did not discourage him from serving in the U.S. Army beginning at age 18
during which he was overseas for two years. When he returned to the U.S. he
decided not to subscribe to pachuco culture anymore. After the war, Alex got
married, had two children, and moved to Tucson to open a branch of the family’s
bakery business. He was about 22 years of age and had lived in Tucson for about a
year when Barker interviewed him.
176
Los Angeles pachucos primarily associated
their culture with zoot culture and African Americans even though there were also

176
Barker, Pachuco, 29.

142

Jewish, Italian, Japanese, and Filipino American zoot suiters who did the same. The
zoot suit was the central cultural aspect defining this Los Angeles version of pachuco
culture.
The Los Angeles version of pachuco culture, however, did not exist in
isolation. While zoot culture was influenced by the national Jazz scene, it was also
influenced by, or at least coexisted with, the El Paso version of pachuco culture.
During the early 1940s, many El Paso pachucos made their way to Los Angeles.
Beto, mentioned in the previous chapter, hopped freights from El Paso to Los
Angeles. At the age of 15, Beto ran away from home and made his way to Los
Angeles, where he became a full-fledged pachuco zoot suiter nicknamed Diablo
(Devil). Beto was in Los Angeles from 1941-43, from age 15 to 17. During this
time he joined a gang in the city of angels composed of youth primarily from El
Paso. This group was based in the Alpine area on the north side of downtown Los
Angeles, a subsection of a larger area better known as Chavez Ravine. With this
gang, Beto was involved in many street fights and also took part in the Zoot Suit
Riots. As far as he was concerned, the Riots occurred because,
sailors got mad because the girls didn’t want to dance with them. They wanted to
dance with the jitterbug guys, you know, the zoot-suiters—nice fancy clothes and
everything. That’s what actually started it between the Marines and the zoot suiters.

His explanation of the Zoot Suit Riots reveals an influence of the Los Angeles
version of pachuco culture on this pachuco from El Paso. In this example, he did not
refer to himself as a pachuco, but rather as “the jitterbug guys, you know, the zoot-
suiters.” This recollection of events demonstrates both, a personal (on the ground)

143

understanding of larger events, and a strong influence of the Los Angeles version of
pachuqismo in his memory. The latter is understandable given that the Zoot Suit
Riots ended up largely influencing the historical memory of pachuco culture.
When the Zoot Suit Riots occurred in June of 1943, the media tried to make
sense of the situation and tried to identify the youth involved. In addition to
referring to the targeted youth in derogatory and diminutive terms, they started
utilizing the term pachuco as well. The media’s portrayals of the Zoot Suit Riots
ended up defining pachucos for the mainstream Los Angeles public and the nation at
large. There were at least two variants of the culture being practiced by ethnic
Mexican youth, not to mention the versions of the culture as practiced by Anglos,
Blacks, and Asians; the media portrayals’ conflated “pachuco” and “zoot suit.” The
media’s portrayal of the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots ended up
defining the meaning of the term “pachuco” as is demonstrated in the next chapters
on Tucson and El Paso post Zoot Suit Riots.

144

CHAPTER 4: TUCSON AND ITS POST-RIOTS PACHUQUISMO

Before the Zoot Suit Riots, pachucos from across the Southwestern United
States associated their culture with El Paso ethnic Mexicans, marijuana, and
smuggling. In Tucson during this period, Mexican American pachucos were
particularly influenced by El Pasoans and Native American pachucos. The culture
was also primarily spread via the migration of people. During World War II,
Mexican Americans familiar with pachuco culture also shared it with each other as
they served in the military.
After the Riots, the most popular conceptions of pachucos and their culture
associated them with Los Angeles, juvenile delinquency, zoot suits and jazz culture.
Whereas pachuco culture was clearly in Tucson prior to 1943, after the Riots
pachuco culture grew in popularity and became more influenced by the Los Angeles
version of pachuco culture. This version of pachuco culture was still spread by the
movement of peoples, but also spread via the mass production of music, artistic
cross-country tours, and newspaper coverage of the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the
Zoot Suit Riots. However, the Mexican American pachuco version emanating from
Los Angeles via music and spread across the Southwest, was being created by Lalo
Guerrero from Tucson and Don Tosti from El Paso. Places in the Southwest who
already had a version of pachuco culture in their respective cities, experienced the
influence from the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture and its coexistence with
the local variety.

145

Similarly to the Riots in Los Angeles, zoot-suiters were attacked throughout
the summer of 1943 in cities across the country in places like Texas, Illinois, and
New York.
177
Inspired by the actions of servicemen in Los Angeles, high school
students in Tucson, Arizona set out on a weekend to follow suit. Tucson police
authorities, however, caught wind of the student’s plans, came out in force, and
prevented the high school students from instigating a riot.
178

This chapter and this dissertation attempts to grasp the intangible. While
zoot-suits are material objects, pachuco culture and the pachuco identity are elusive
realities. Nevertheless, this chapter, like much of this dissertation, attempts to
document the history of pachucos and their culture. Based on the evidence which
has survived the last 65 years, I strive to ascertain the extent to which we can learn
about pachuco experiences, their thoughts and attitudes, and their daily practices.
This chapter is an example of what we can learn about pachucos and their culture in
Tucson, Arizona, after the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles brought pachucos
drastically greater attention and notoriety.
This chapter analyses the primary evidence and focuses on local examples of
pachucos and the transference of their culture. These sources were derived from
pachuco voices recorded in music lyrics throughout the 1940s, the unpublished

177
Sitkoff, Harvard. "Racial Militancy and Racial Violence in the Second World War." Journal of
American History 58, no. 3 (1971): 661-81.

178
Barker, George Carpenter. "Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Functions in
Tucson, Arizona." Social science bulletin; no. 18; University of Arizona Bulletin Series; v. 21, no. 1;
(1950): 38.

146

research notes of the University of Arizona Anthropologist George C. Barker, and
interviews conducted with former pachucos based on their recollections.
One of the most valuable sources this chapter makes use of is a recorded
conversation between two Tucson pachuco youths in 1947. This chapter analyses
this 30 minute recording, the purpose of which was for the two self-identified
pachucos to demonstrate to George C. Barker their ability to speak pachuco caló.
This recording of Tucson pachucos is the most extensive documentation of pachuco
voices from any city in the U.S. Southwest or Mexico. With the exception of brief
lyrics in music, or court transcripts in Los Angeles, these are the only pachucos
whose voices are recorded during the 1940s. There have been many interviews
conducted with former pachucos, but they were all interviewed several decades later
when their view of pachuco culture could have faded or changed.
The documentation of pachuco culture prior to the Zoot Suit Riots is slim,
compared to the post Riots documentation. Given the fact that this dissertation
argues that the meaning of pachuco culture changed between the early and late
1940s, it must be taken into account that all interviews were conducted after the
Riots, and the interviewees’ explanation of pachuco culture before and after the Riots
was based on the post-Riots associations of pachuco culture.
The post Riots development of pachuco culture in Tucson will be explained
via the experiences of the musician Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero during the 1930s and
1940s, the pachucos interviewed by Barker in the mid to late 1940s, and the
experiences of the Tucson resident Renato Rosaldo during the early 1950s.

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LALO GUERRERO
The best known speaker of pachuco caló from Tucson is the musician
Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero. Guerrero’s upbringing and musical career illustrates how
Tucson youth were in cultural communication with youth from both Los Angeles
and El Paso via the diffusion of Mexican, American, and Mexican American genres
of music. Guerrero was born in Tucson in 1916. His parents came from the
Mexican state of Sonora which borders Arizona to the south. It was common for
Mexican immigrants living in Tucson to have Sonorense roots.
Guerrero learned Mexican music from the radio, and from his mother who
taught him to play the guitar at a young age. The guitar was the most popular
instrument in Mexican music during the 1930s. When in high school, Guerrero
joined a group which succeeded in getting on a weekly radio program in which they
sang Mexican music and some popular English music.
179
The radio show earned
him popularity and the trio started performing in both Spanish and English for
private family celebrations like weddings and birthdays.
During his late teens, Guerrero also learned about blues and swing music
from an African American Jazz nightclub called The Beehive, only a few blocks
from his home. The club had four windows that were usually open for ventilation,
Guerrero and his friends stood in front of these looking in.
180
It was also during his

179
Mentes, Sherilyn Meece. Lalo: My Life and Music. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press,
2002. 46.

180
Ibid., 43.

148

teens, in the 1930s, that he worked at a bakery with youth from El Paso who taught
him to speak pachuco caló.
Guerrero aspired to play both ethnic Mexican and American musical genres.
Guerrero recorded in multiple genres throughout his career, but the genres from
Latin America and in the Spanish language remained consistent throughout his
career. While still in Tucson, Guerrero wrote and performed mostly in the Mexican
genres of rancheras, corridos, polkas, corridos, and ballads. One example of this is
the song Cancion Mexicana, which Lalo wrote in 1937 and eventually became one
of Mexico’s favorite songs. Before moving to Los Angeles, and during his early
years in Los Angeles, he belonged to an ethnic Mexican group called Los Carlistas.
Guerrero was always in touch with musical trends and current events. The
topics discussed in his music reflected topics significant to ethnic Mexicans
throughout the Southwest. The genres in which he recorded his music reflected the
influence and prominence of new genres, especially Latin American ones. When in
Tucson, he performed Mexican genres because they were in demand by both the
ethnic Mexican community and Anglo patrons in Tucson. This was also reinforced
by a two month visit Guerrero did to Mexico City, which made him anxious to
demonstrate his new knowledge of Mexican music upon his return to Tucson.
While Lalo had written many songs in Tucson, it was not until he frequented
Los Angeles that he began recording his compositions. In Los Angeles he made
music, first in traditional Mexican genres, and eventually in the American jazz styles
of swing and boogie. During his early years in Los Angeles, he continued with the

149

Tucson group, Los Carlistas. His first recordings with Vocalion Records in 1939
were all in Spanish and included the genres of corrido, huapango, comic, fox trot,
corrida, ranchera, and ballad. All of these genres reflected a strong Latin American
influence in his repertoire.
One Latin American influence in particular was the Mexican singer Agustin
Lara. Lara made an indelible impression on pachuco influenced musicians despite
the fact that Lara did not record anything specifically pachuco-themed. While Lara
is not an obvious influence because of his piano playing and romantic lyrics, his
music spoke to the womanizing, smooth-talking aspect of pachuco culture addressed
later with the voice of the pachuco nicknamed Chato. Both Lalo Guerrero and
German Valdes “Tin Tan” (addressed in the El Paso chapters) began their careers
with explicit references to Lara. Guerrero recalled Lara as his idol in the 1930s and
the first solo record Guerrero recorded was a song written by Lara called
Pecadora.
181

When recording for Imperial Records from 1946 to 1952, Guerrero continued
with the same genres as part of the ethnic Mexican group Trio Imperial. Despite
recording the same genres, Guerrero reflected the issues of the time with songs about
braceros, lavaplatos (dishwashers), piscadores (field-hands). But most obvious of
all, he added topics reflecting the influence of pachuco culture. The first pachuco
song he recorded was La Pachuquilla (The Young Pachuca). Other songs with
pachuco themes included La Boda de Los Pachucos (The Pachuco Wedding), Las

181
Mentes, Sherilyn M. Lalo: My Life and Music. 53, 196.

150

Comadres Pachucas (The Pachuca Godmothers), Maldita Suerte del Pachuco
(Damned Luck of the Pachuco), Los Dos Carnales (The Two Homeboys), Mujeres
Pachucadas (Pachucafied Women), El Pachuco, El Pachuco y el Tarzan, and El
Pachuco Guaino (The Wine-o Pachuco). El Tirilongo (The Reefer) reflected an
influence from El Paso tirilis by using the word tirili. The song Ya Me Voy para
Korea (I’m Now Leaving to Korea) dealt with the ethnic Mexican involvement with
the Korean War. With Trio Imperial, however, Guerrero did not yet delve much into
recording “American” genres since the aforementioned pachuco-themed songs were
still within the musical genres of Mexican music. The lyrics were about pachucos,
primarily in Spanish with some caló, but the genres they were composed in were
traditionally Mexican, such as rancheras or corridos. The songs were not yet
composed with primarily English lyrics or in United States-based genres like swing
or boogie.
Don Tosti, from El Paso, recorded half a dozen pachuco themed songs in Los
Angeles in 1948 and 1949, right before Lalo Guerrero recorded five pachuco themed
songs of his own in 1949 and 1950. When recording with other groups, and
especially Lalo y Sus Cinco Lobos (Lalo and his Five Wolves), Guerrero
incorporated new genres including the jazz genres of blues, swing, and boogie; as
well as the new Latin American genres of rumba and mambo. The mix of any genre
with pachuco themes and caló lyrics also became a genre of its own called

151

pachuco.
182
The swing and boogie songs included strong pachuco influences that
Guerrero brought from Tucson, and likely intermixed with what he learned from Los
Angeles and El Paso pachucos.
One of the first songs by Lalo Guerrero y Sus Cinco Lobos (Pete Alcaraz,
Frank Quijada, David Lopez, Carlos Guerrero, and Alfonso Rojo) was one called
Chucos Suaves (Cool Pachucos). It did an excellent job of describing musical
influences and fads among pachucos throughout the Southwest. In this song, he
described how at that particular moment of late 1949, swing, boogie woogie, and
jitterbug were passé. The new genres that were “in” were the rumba, guaracha,
botecito, and danzón. Interestingly enough, this appears to be a distancing from
African American associated genres, and a gravitation toward Afro-Cuban music
from Cuba and Mexico.
Other songs recorded in 1949 and 1950 included Marijuana Boogie, Vamos a
Bailar (Let’s Go Dance), Muy Sabroso Blues (Very Delicious Blues) and Chicas
Patas Boogie (Pachuco Boogie). Marijuana Boogie represented the continued
association between pachucos and the drug. Vamos a Bailar demonstrated the
importance of dancing to the culture. Muy Sabroso Blues illustrated the central role
that women played with a song about a great kissing girlfriend that drove the
boyfriend madly in love. Chicas Patas Boogie (literally Small Feet Boogie, but also
another word for Pachuco Boogie) was about the spread of pachuco culture
throughout the Southwestern United States, in particular he mentions cities such as

182
This is not a widely recognized genre but was referred to as such in Mentes, Sherilyn M. Lalo: My
Life and Music. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2002. 191-193.

152

Sacramento in California, El Paso in Texas, Albuquerque in New Mexico as well as
the states of Arizona and Colorado.
During the mid 1940s when Lalo Guerrero had already recorded his pachuco
songs in the ranchera genre and was popular in Tucson, but had not yet recorded his
pachuco songs in any jazz genres; George C. Barker was meeting with pachucos in
Tucson street corners and soda fountains to inquire about their pachuco caló.
PACHUCO STORYTELLERS
In the 1930s and 1940s, before the advent of television, story telling was a
popular pastime. Radios played soap operas on the radio. Newspapers printed
comic strips that needed to be followed daily or weekly to learn the whole story. The
printed media also relayed, in narrative form, the real-life drama of World War II
with daily updates in the front pages. Music, of course, has always told stories.
Pachucos too, were storytellers. It is through their stories, and stories about them,
that the associations to pachuco culture took shape. Most of what has been published
on the topics associated with pachucos has focused on the stories about pachucos
told by non-pachucos which has lead to the outsider perspective which did not
distinguish between pachucos regardless of time and place. This section will focus
on stories told by pachucos themselves to get an insider understanding of Tucson
pachucos and their culture.
Story telling was essential to pachucos because it was their way of
demonstrating how exciting their life was. It served as a recruiting tool as they told
their stories to children, teens and young adults. It inspired other pachucos to do

153

daring things so that they too could have exciting experiences (like servicemen too),
and also gain status and respect from other youths as they learned their daring or
entertaining antics.
When Barker conducted his research in Tucson during the mid to late 1940s,
he interviewed at least 15 pachucos. The two pachucos he audio-recorded in 1947
were known as Crow and Chato.
183
These pachucos did not claim to represent all
pachucos, nor did they claim that all the stories they told were factual. They simply
demonstrated their pachuco caló abilities to Barker at a diner in downtown Tucson.
This chapter analyzes the only pachuco interview in existence that was
recorded during the 1940s. Aside from brief lyrics in songs, this is the earliest and
most extensive recording of pachuco voices that exists. While these recordings do
not have the shortcomings of interviews recorded decades later such as selective
memory; these recordings have some flaws of their own such as little biographical
information about the interviewees, and a lack of self-censorship with regards to
propriety. This may be one of the reasons that no one treating with the topic of
pachucos has made use of these recordings. Then again, perhaps these youth were
being themselves. Feeling nothing to lose because of anonymity, they had fun with
the idea that an Anglo anthropologist from the University of Arizona was interested
in their fluency in pachuco caló.

183
Ralph Acosta and Alex Corral are possibly the real names of Crow and Chato based on the
unpublished notes of George C. Barker. University of Arizona, Special Collections 85-2/R1. George
C. Barker Collection.

154

The recording consists of about 30 minutes of two pachucos story-telling, and
30 minutes of singing pachuco songs and conversation with a family. During the
first 30 minutes they recount their experiences in their pachuco caló dialect and end
up telling 20 stories. Crow, the first storyteller in the recordings, performs the role
of the womanizing, caló-agile, pachuco. The second interviewee, Chato, plays the
role of the laid-back, deep-voice, slow talking, cool pachuco.
I say Crow and Chato “performed” for a number of reasons. They obviously
knew they were being recorded, so in a sense they knew they were performing. On
the other hand, they were not performing. They were as real as every other person
who “performs” on a daily basis with the appropriate clothing and attitude to play
their roles as students, parents, teachers, and doctors. They did not read a script.
Their objective was to demonstrate their real pachuco caló abilities. They did this by
discussing topics of interest to pachucos. I describe two sub-archetypes within
pachuco culture because pachuco culture consisted of many such “characters,” some
of which are unique and others which have been replicated over and over for
decades.
The roles they performed were part of the sub-archetypes within pachuco
culture. The pachuco was been caricaturized as a Mexican American male who wore
a zoot suit in Los Angeles during World War II. Some caricaturization is useful for
the purposes of distinguishing pachucos from non-pachucos. There were some
cultural characteristics, both material and ideological, that were popular or common
among participants of pachuco culture. There were also sub-archetypes within

155

pachuco culture that allowed for individualism. Part of this is related to the
nicknames that were given to youth participants of the culture.
Noisy, for example, was a nickname assigned as a result of an individual’s
personality. In this case it was given to a Tucson youth as a joke for the fact that he
was very shy and quiet. Noisy, however, is an archetype of a set of individuals that
were attracted to pachuco culture. Sleepy and Sad Eyes, are modern cholo
nicknames for individuals that fit one of the personality types which participated in
pachuco culture, that is men or women who were shy, quiet, and inconspicuous.
Toro, on the other hand, is an example of a nickname which would be given to
physically aggressive pachucos.
The Homies characters of the twenty first century are one way in which to
understand this pachuco archetype phenomenon. The Homies company makes small
plastic figures that represent members of the Latino community. On the one hand,
they are stereotypes of certain members of the community such as those that look
like modern cholos. On the other hand, they illustrate the different “characters” or
sub-archetypes of the community, and within cholo culture itself.
184

Crow and Chato recount their twenty stories in 100% pachuco caló. The
overwhelming majority of the stories they told were in Spanish. In this respect, most
of their pachuco caló was a form of Spanish slang. Pachuco caló, however, cannot
be reduced to Spanish or Spanish slang because many of the words they invented
were derived from English words and English slang. This stands in contrast to the

184
http://www.homies.tv/ Accessed September 21, 2009.

156

English-based jive that was popular among participants of zoot culture in Los
Angeles.
The most common theme the two pachucos addressed throughout the twenty
stories they recounted was women. 60% of their stories had to do with women and
sex. What most occupied their minds was dancing with women, playing pranks on
them, gossiping about them, and recalling both attempted and allegedly successful
sexual escapades. Their obsession both objectified women, as in when they just
wanted them for sex, and at other times empowered women, such as when they gave
women respect for their actions. With regards to their fascination with women,
pachucos may not have been very different from other youth of different racial and
ethnic groups. Many young men simply obsess over young women.
The worst example of the pachuco objectification of women was when, in
one of the twenty stories, Crow told of an alleged gang rape that he and three other
pachucos perpetrated. Everyone was intoxicated, she was accompanied by female
friends to the location of the incident, both pachucos telling the stories knew her by
name, and they recalled dropping her off at her house afterwards. Crow thought he
was sly because he did not allow her parents, nor the police, to force him to marry
her or even acknowledge his role in the incident. If this incident really happened, it
was a failure of law enforcement to prosecute the young men for their actions. The
pachuco’s biggest concern was not being pressured by her parents or police to marry
the female victim.

157

The last two of the twenty stories are the only ones which dealt with African
Americans. They were both about women. The first was by Chato, who said he
went to an alley known to have “bumblebees,” a term which may have referred to
female patrons of an African American nightclub called The Beehive.
185
Both
pachucos refer to a particular African American woman with various labels,
including one in English which was omitted by the recorder of the oral history. Tinta
(inked), tinacate and pinacate were the labels used to refer to them in Spanish slang.
Chato implied he had sex with the woman in question, but only by agreeing to the
implication by Crow, which I interpret as a lie on Chato’s behalf.
The second story about an African American woman was by Crow. Both
pachucos mentioned two specific African American women they knew by name, but
their names where omitted by the recorder. This act adds credence to the story being
based on real people. Crow claimed one of the women took him to her room where
she had a ton of awesome records by “Tommy Dorsey y todos esos vatos” (Tommy
Dorsey and all those guys). To Crow, this woman was not like other women, not
even like other African American women. To begin with, in his opinion she was
Black but she did not look like a “tinta” (meaning Black woman). He tried to have
sexual intercourse with her but admitted he did not because “la chavala era muy
suave” (she was too cool/smooth). To which Chato acknowledged “no era una de
esas” (She wasn’t one of those”). These comments lead one to believe that these
pachucos subscribed to the virgin/whore dichotomous understanding of women. To

185
Mentes, Lalo: My Life and Music, 43.

158

them, there were two categories of women, promiscuous and proper. In these two
stories regarding African American women, they labeled one the former, and one the
latter.
After women, the next most popular topic in these two Tucson pachucos’
stories was getting intoxicated. 45% of their twenty stories made explicit references
to getting intoxicated. The majority (55%) of these specifically referred to alcohol.
Surprisingly, only four stories made reference to marijuana or getting high. This was
because the marijuana smoking/dealing association, which was central in El Paso
pachuco culture, was less important of an association in Tucson than the speaking of
pachuco caló.
Seven of the twenty stories made reference to violence, specifically fist fights
and confrontations. Three of these were accompanied by displays of rhetorical
battles in pachuco caló. The incident below was recounted by Chato concerning his
verbal exchange with a pachuco from Los Angeles.

Pachuco caló English
Una ves estaba yo parado One time I was standing
en una esquina at a street corner
de la Main, ese, ... of Main St. see
Cuando viene un vato ese When this guy comes
Y me dice and tells me
“ese carnal Pues que lenguaje?” “Hey brother what’s your language?”
pues “nada ese, pues que 18” le digo yo nothing, what’s your 18? I tell him
pues chale le voy a joder “Well I beat you cause
por que manana es 19 tomorrow is the 19th”
Pues chale usted esta muy equivocado Well you’re mistaken
le digo yo I tell him
por que no se descuentas ese Why don’t you discount yourself, man
“nel” dice el vato naw, says the guy

159

luego le digo yo then I tell him
Ya estuvo cara de tuvo That’s it tube face [rhymes in Spanish]
andale cara de tabla, get going table face,
le digo yo I tell him
el vato se queda chale... the guy is stunned
Lo me dice and then he tells me
“Ese vato de donde es usted?” Man, where are you from?
Pues si yo soy de la Tusas ese Well I am from Tuscon, man
Pues si “Yo soy de aqui “Well I am from right here
de Laas Aangelees,” from Laas Aangelees”
me dice el bato my locote, el vato the guy tells me all crazy
pues andava muy sonado cause he was high
#1 Yo me doy cuenta #1 Yeah, I know
de ese bato de Long Beach of that guy from Long Beach
#2 Y luego que me tira un cabronazo ese #2 He then throws a punch at me
pues este vato se la quita I get out of its way
Y le tiro ese, and I throw back
Le tiro con un Mosclos ese,... I hit him with a Mosclos, man
usted sabe que es un mosclos que no?... you know what it is, right?
#1 o simonazo, una blackjack oiga
186
#1 Oh yeah, its a blackjack
#2 andele de esas cosas ese #2 there you go, one of those
pues le tire y lo tumbe well I hit him and dropped him
y lo lo agarre en el piso and I got him on the ground
y dije, es mio el vato este and I though, this guy is mine
pues le cambie la cara so I changed his face
con tres patadas (risa) with three kicks (laughs)
asi estuvos ese that’s how it was man

This incident reveals a few aspects of the local variation of pachuco culture.
For starters, these Tucson pachucos knew about pachucos in Los Angeles. From
Chato’s perspective, Los Angeles pachucos thought they were special as evidenced
by the fact that when this pachuco was asked “where are you from?,” he responded
with an elongated and emphasized “I am from Laas Aangelees.” The story also
reveals the use and transfer of knowledge of crude, affordable, and possibly

186
A blackjack is a small stealth weapon, easily made and concealed. Most likely a small sack filled
with anything hard and heavy like coins or rocks. It could also have been a short club with a heavy
head and a flexible handle.

160

homemade weapons. Chato explained he beat up his rival with a blackjack
“mosclos,” as in a homemade billy club. Finally, part of the fight involved not only
a rude exchange of words and a physical fight, but also a pachuco caló battle with
wit and rhyme.
187

The other topics most discussed in the twenty stories Crow and Chato
recounted were in regards to the police, dancing, music, and zoot suits. Almost all
the stories relating to police had to do with the police approaching the pachucos to or
from “A” mountain, the most prominent local landmark. In more than one story the
pachucos were approached by police, some of which they knew by name, and
questioned just for being in the park. On more than one occasion, the pachucos
claimed to rid themselves of the police by speaking witty pachuco caló to the
officers. The fourth story was one in which Chato told of such an incident.

Pachuco Calo English
Una ves sali yo pal pueblo ese One time I went out to town, man
pero me siguio una jura, but the police followed me
no se porque I don’t know why
fastidiosa yo creo just to annoy I think
me siguio la jura the police followed me
porque corri pal parque Cause I ran to the park
Alla me agarro el Ralph Morman
Ralph Morman ese, got me, man
el hura ese... that officer...
y lo me dice then he tells me
pues “que trai usted?” “What do you got?”
pues yo no traigo nada I say I don’t have anything
pues le digo yo then I say
mas vale que se descuente ese you better discount yourself

187
“Ya estuvo cara de tuvo,” and “andale cara de tabla,” are examples of the rhyming and witty aspect
of a pachuco calo battle. The two phrases which rhyme when said in calo translate as “That’s it tube
face,” and “get going table face.”

161

porque si no le va venir siendo cause if you don’t you’ll end up like
camote deritido ese melted yams
sabe que pontelo en el chante put it away [fast-spoken illogical caló]
no hay pedo y cuando there’s no problem cause when
se arrenda cuidado ese I take the reigns, watch yourself
Pues si ese, le tire loco y I spoke crazy to him and
Se borro, se Borro! he left, he left!

While pachucos made it clear that they did not appreciate police harassing
them, that they were always trying to avoid police, and that they would get rid of
police by outsmarting them in verbal exchanges, it is ironic that these two pachucos
never spoke of police in more malicious terms. Every time the police are mentioned,
they are positioned in antagonistic relationships with pachucos. If the two pachucos
were afraid of reprisal they probably would not have been confessing to crimes as
serious as rape and assault with a deadly weapon. To Crow and Chato,
demonstrating hate could have meant arguing that the police were racist, which
might imply that Tucson Anglos were racist, and they did not want to insult their
interviewer. Along these lines, it could be that pachucos regularly insulted police
with racist terms and they refrained from any substantive hate in order not to offend
the white anthropologist recording them. Another possibility is that the pachucos
focused on recounting misogynistic vignettes, instead of police brutality or racism,
because they felt that their interest in women was a common bridge between men of
any race or ethnic group.
Five of the stories dealt with dancing, music, and zoot suits. They all had to
do with meeting women at the Flamingo Cabaret, the Casino Ballroom, or the

162

Beehive Jazz night club. In three of the stories the pachucos claimed to have had sex
after dancing, in the other two stories they admitted to not having sex.
The two pachucos made at least half a dozen references to places outside
Tucson, they were always either Los Angeles or El Paso which reinforces the
argument that Tucson and El Paso were important sites of pachuco culture. Los
Angeles and El Paso were part of what these Tucson pachucos associated with
pachuco culture in 1947. Unfortunately there are some important topics that are
missing from these recorded conversations including: pachuco gangs, Native
American pachucos, African American men, and pachuco relations with Anglos.
Immediately after the Zoot Suit Riots, the popularity of pachuco culture
seemed to have changed and declined. This may have appeared to be the case in Los
Angeles but it is not the case for other places across the Southwest such as Tucson
and El Paso. Following WWII, Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero performed pachuco
themed music in Los Angeles. It could be that they were playing to a smaller, but
ever present pachuco culture audience in Los Angeles. The number of weekend
wearers of the zoot suit is likely to have declined in Los Angeles because of the
demonizing of the zoot suit wearers by the media, hence making the culture seem
less popular. However, the music that Guerrero and Tosti recorded was distributed
to jukeboxes throughout the Southwest which helped popularize pachuco culture in
the region. So while the zoot suit was less popular in Los Angeles after the Riots,
the zoot suit and pachuco culture only grew in popularity across the Southwest
during the 1940s.

163

Being a pachuco was just a phase to many Mexican American youth.
Many left behind pachuco culture when they left to serve in the military during
WWII. More than 350,000 Mexican Americans served in the military during the
War.
188
Some have argued they earned more Congressional Medal’s of Honor than
any other ethnic group in the United States.
189
Upon returning from the service,
former pachucos focused on getting jobs, changing their dress style, and raising a
family, to stay out of trouble. Others still identified as pachucos when they returned
from the military. Despite popular misconceptions in 1943, evidence shows that
most pachucos of draft age served in the military. They even recruited and taught
other youth in the military about pachuco culture. Some appropriated elements from
the style of the U.S. Army into a new form of pachuquismo when they returned to
civilian life. This occurred after both WWII and the Korean Conflict.
Many took on new forms of pachuquismo with less of an emphasis on the
zoot suit. They emulated military uniforms by shaving their head, wearing khaki
pants and shirts, and ironing creases on their everyday clothes. This was a change
from wearing work clothes on work days, to wearing neat and ironed clothes on a
regular basis. This fashion also transferred the neat and creased look of the more
formal zoot suits, to clothing that was less expensive and more common. Even when
they wore elements of the military uniform in their new pachuco style, they gave it

188
Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II,
American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008. 17.

189
Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, ed. Mexican Americans and World War II Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2005. xvii.

164

their own flavor through means such as wearing oversized pants, reminiscent of the
zoot suit. The wearing of clothing similar to the Army uniform also made it more
difficult for critics of pachuco culture to call them un-American or unpatriotic,
especially given that many of them were military veterans themselves. This is one of
the directions pachuco culture evolved into, from pachuco to vato loco, to the cholo
culture of the late twentieth century.
190

Vato loco, culture, however, was not the only direction pachuco culture
evolved. Mechanic and body shop repair men were popular jobs among former
pachucos. Since many ethnic Mexicans could not afford to buy new cars, or
preferred to buy used cars; there was a growing demand for good mechanics and
body shop workers. This became part of the new development of pachuco culture in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. More former pachucos could afford to have a car if
they fixed up an old car themselves. It was also a way to stay occupied, make some
money, and stay out of trouble. It instilled in them the knowledge necessary to
modify their cars in unique ways so they could cruise around town and show off their
cars. This is, in short, how pachuco culture also evolved into lowrider culture.
191

MORE TUCSON PACHUCOS AND PACHUCAS
The experiences of Francis Montano and ten Tucson pachucos helps us
understand the post Riots version of pachuco culture during the mid to late 1940s in

190
For more on vato loco and cholo culture see Vigil, James Diego. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and
Identity in Southern California. Seventh ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 87-124.

191
For more on lowriding culture see Sandoval, Denise M. "Bajito Y Suavecito/Low and Slow:
Cruising through Lowrider Culture." Ph.D. Diss, Claremont Graduate University, 2003.

165

Tucson. Montano’s parents were Mexican born Yaqui Indians.
192
She grew up in
Barrio Viejo in the northernmost part of South Tucson, close to downtown Tucson,
until 1948 when she moved to Barrio Hollywood in the northwest side of Tucson.
Both Barrio Viejo and Barrio Hollywood were majority ethnic Mexican
neighborhoods and Montano fit in with non-Yaqui ethnic Mexicans. She started
going to dance halls such as the Bluemoon nightclub starting in 1945. In 1950 she
won $50 on a Jitterbug contest. She also recalled that The Victoria, and Bob’s Place,
were popular dance clubs. Montano believed she was not very popular among her
female peers because she was a better dancer than most. In particular, she recalls she
beat one girl at the jitterbug contest at The Victoria, and that young woman
threatened to beat her up. “Te voy agarrar o.k” (I’m gonna get you o.k.) she
remembered the girl threatening her. Montano shared her upbringing during the
2005 interview mostly in English, but with occasional demonstrations of her fluency
in Spanish and Spanglish.
Even though she got into fights with a few African Americans while in high
school, she was fascinated by their ability to dance. Montano learned the steps by
watching the black dancers at the African American USO by the Holy Family
Church. Her grandmother would take her to the fence of the USO so she could
watch and learn. Montano explained that when she won her jitterbug contests, “Yo
tenia a los negros aqui” (I had the blacks, right here) she would say as she pointed to
her head. She also had high school friends that were always at the dances. She was

192
Interview of Francis Montano by Lydia Otero, Ph.D., Tucson, Arizona, March 12, 2005.

166

not unique at the Blue Moon since she recalled many Mexican Americans filling up
the club, especially on nights when artists such as Benny Goodman or Harry James
were there. During the mid 1940s there are three areas of Tucson that had small
African American populations, they were Dunbar Springs, Millville, and in the
Meyer-Convent areas. The African American population did not reach even 5% of
Tucson’s population. Dunbar Springs was not yet called by that name, but the
African American residents in that area were in northwestern Tucson, not far from
Barrio Hollywood where Montano just had to cross the Santa Cruz River, and Barrio
Anita to get there. Meyer and Convent was very close to downtown and Millville
was just southwest of downtown.
While Montano was interviewed in 2005, Barker interviewed at least fifteen
Mexican American Tucson youths in the mid to late 1940s. Most of these Mexican
American youth were interviewed several times. Five were non-pachucos, and the
ten pachucos are addressed below. Of these ten, half were from Toro’s clique and
half were part of Sapo’s clique.
193

Toro’s gang lived in Barrio Libre which was the term used to refer to the
northern section of South Tucson, which began immediately south of downtown.
Libre is the Spanish word for “free.” One explanation for why it was called Barrio
Libre, is that everyone was “free” to do anything in that part of town. The
perception was that “anything goes” in Barrio Libre. It was also the poorest area in
the city with the reputation of being home to most of the “bad” pachucos. As such,

193
Barker, Pachuco, 25.

167

they were known as the only pachucos in Tucson “who used chains to threaten and
intimidate ‘squares.” Despite living in Barrio Libre, Toro’s gang hung out mostly
around downtown Tucson. They frequented the Capitol Theater and Jukeland
Arcade on the principal thoroughfare of downtown Tucson, Congress Street.
194

The ages of Toro’s clique-members ranged from 17 to 22. Only one of the
five was in school. Toro, at age 22, most neatly fit the pachuco stereotype as Barker
saw it. Toro had an athletic build, was dark-complexioned, and could have been
considered handsome were it not for scars and pockmarks. He had a thin moustache
and nostrils that dilated broadly (hence the nickname meaning bull), coarse black
hair which he combed back, and wore an old army shirt, army pants with narrow
cuffs (like zoot suit pants), and thick soled shoes.
195
Barker noted that “When he
talks pachuco he constantly uses his hands and his voice drawls out the endings of
words in a sonorous manner.”
196
His use of army shirts and pants are indicative of
the post-WWII version of pachuco culture as it evolved beyond 1943 pachuco
culture into the “vato loco” culture that was still referred to as “pachuco” during the
late 1940s and 1950s. Barker’s reference to him as an exemplary pachuco may have
also been because of the centrality of pachuco caló to Tucson’s conception of
pachuquismo as opposed to the centrality of the zoot suit in Los Angeles before
1943.

194
Barker, 25.

195
Ibid., 26.

196
Ibid., 26. It is this author’s suspicion that Toro is really Chato, the youth Barker audio-recorded in
1947.

168

Toro lived with his father in Barrio Libre and lived all of his life in Tucson,
except during WWII when he served in the U.S. Army. While in the service, he
visited Los Angeles and was stationed for several months in New York. After
WWII, he worked with his father’s dump truck, but this work was sporadic so he
spent a lot of time dallying around with friends. Toro was popular among Mexican
American youth and well known to the police. He hung around the Jukeland Arcade,
one of Tucson’s most notorious pachuco meeting places.
197
The playing of jazz and
pachuco themed records in jukeboxes is one of the ways through which pachuco
culture was propagated. Toro was arrested once and put in city jail for disturbing the
peace. He was held for two weeks before being released for lack of evidence against
him. Barker learned about another incident involving Toro and the police from a
newspaper article. According to police as reported in the newspaper, during a party
at Toro’s house he got into a knife fight with another pachuco named Leonardo.
Toro was taken to the hospital for stitches.
198

Luey G., a member of Toro’s gang, helps explain the spread of pachuco
culture further.
199
He also lived in Barrio Libre and was 19 when Barker interviewed
him. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 16 and spent one year and one half in
Germany with the U.S. Occupation Army. Luey spoke English, Spanish, German,
and pachuco caló. He claimed to have learned caló from other Spanish-Speaking

197
Barker, 26.

198
Ibid., 26.

199
Ibid., 27.

169

“boys” in the army.
200
Luey’s experience adds credence to the notion that Pachuco
culture was spread across the U.S. Southwest during and after the war through
military service, in addition to music and migration. After WWII, he got a job in a
brickyard on West Congress St. The fact that he owned a car made him an important
member of Toro’s gang. Luey regularly drove their group to dances and parties.
Bill, another member of Toro’s group, quit school since the 6
th
grade and was 17
when Barker interviewed him.
201
He worked at the brickyard with Luey G. and this
is presumably how they met.
Pete R., alias Goofy, was a native of Tucson and lived on Meyer Street. He
was age 20 when Barker interviewed him and had quit high school before finishing
to work as a miner. Unlike his fellow pachucos, he never served in the Army but had
made brief trips to both Los Angeles and El Paso. He happened to be unemployed at
the time of Barker’s interview.
202

The fifth of Toro’s group members was Frank T., alias “Goat.” He was 17 at
the time of Barker’s interview with him and was in the 10
th
grade at Tucson High
School. As with Toro, it was significant for Barker to note that Frank had a “very
dark complexion.
203
However, it appears Frank disclosed to Barker that he was
interested in ending his pachuco tendencies. Frank had a mom that was strongly

200
Barker, 27.

201
Ibid.

202
Ibid.

203
Ibid.

170

anti-pachuco and he got a Saturday job which kept him away from his pachuco
friends. Frank explained that he refrained from speaking caló to his mom’s
acquaintances and that “respectable married people” don’t approve of pachucos.
204

Sapo’s gang lived in the downtown area and sometimes hung out there along
West Congress Street, but more often than not they hung out in the neighborhood
around Sapo’s house just west of downtown referred to as La Meyer and El
Convento.
205
Sapo’s pachuco friends varied from age 15 to 21 and like Toro’s
group, only one remained in school.
206
What is deceiving about pointing out how
many went to school is that they were hardly of school age. Many of the pachucos
Barker interviewed were already beyond high school age at the time he met them. It
was also all too common for young men of all ethnic and racial groups, and
especially ethnic Mexicans regardless of pachuco affiliation, to drop out of high
school and get a job.
According to well regarded study of United States high school graduation
rates, 51% of high school age youth graduated from high school in 1940, only 43%
graduated in 1944 since many left school for high paying defense industry jobs, and
60% graduated by 1950.
207
When region is taken into account, the Pacific region of

204
Barker, 28. It is the author’s suspicion that Frank is really “Crow,” and Toro is really “Chato” the
two men in the recorded interview from 1947.

205
Ibid., 25.

206
Ibid., 26.

207
Goldin, Claudia. "America's Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of
Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century." The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (1998):
348.

171

the United States had higher graduation rates of 71% in 1940, 54% in 1944, and 63%
by 1950.
208
Even when compared to national and regional statistics, the Tucson
sampling of pachucos did not fare negatively. Of the ten pachucos in Toro’s and
Sapo’s cliques, 5 were not of high school age, 2 quit school, and 3 were in school.
Sapo, for example, was 21 years old when Barker interviewed him.
209
He
lived with his parents on South Meyer St. He was described as having a massive
build, round face (possible source of the nickname meaning Toad), and like Toro had
a small moustache. Like most Tucsonense pachucos of service age, Sapo was a
WWII veteran. After the service, Sapo worked with his father in construction as a
plasterer. With this income, Sapo bought his own car but whenever possible he
would drive and show off his father’s more expensive car instead. Sapo’s house was
a meeting place for his friends. Barker first met him while Sapo and three friends
were driving through the Tohono O’ Odham (Papago) Native American village nine
miles south of Tucson. This is but one example, and evidence, of Native American
and pachuco interactions. On two other occasions, Barker ran into him while Sapo
was cruising in his father’s car. Sapo explained to Barker that he learned his caló in
Tucson, from friends, cousins, and music records. This is another example of the
vitality of pachuco culture in Tucson, and the spread of the culture throughout the
southwest through the mass production of music in the form of records. Sapo also
revealed that he sometimes spoke to his parents in caló even though they did not

208
Goldin, 359.

209
Barker, 28.

172

understand the dialect. The importance of having a car for the group to ride in
seemed important for both Toro’s and Sapo’s friends.
Rudy J. “Tack” was another member of Sapo’s gang.
210
For some
undisclosed reason, Barker identified Rudy as a “model pachuco.” Perhaps it was
because of the ducktail hairstyle he wore and the extent of pachuco caló he knew.
Although he learned much of his caló on Congress Street in Tucson, he had the
advantage, and prestige, of having learned caló in California during a 3 month trip in
which he worked as a celery picker in Southern California, and on airplanes in the
northern California city of San Jose. Rudy was 18 at the time Barker interviewed
him and despite the extent of his caló fluency, he explained that he never spoke caló
to his parents or siblings.
211
There was a degree of prestige associated with having
learned some pachuco caló in California because Los Angeles pachuco culture had
gained infamy as THE place most associated with pachuco culture after the Zoot Suit
Riots in 1943, and these interviews were conducted between 1945 and 1949.
Freddy P was also in Sapo’s gang. Unlike his friends, Freddy was very
serious and rarely smiled or laughed. Perhaps this was a result of his family
problems. His Mexican mother died when he was only one year old and his Anglo
father remarried. He was 16 when he met Barker and disclosed he had learned his
caló in both Tucson and L.A. Since Barker did not mention his dropping out of

210
Barker, 28.

211
Ibid., 28. Barker thought it was significant to share that Rudy had a big head, perhaps because of
his alias “Tack.”

173

school, it is likely Freddy was still in school at the time of the interview.
212
Joe F.
also had an Anglo father and a Mexican mother. He may have been Freddy P’s 18
year old half-brother. Joe lived on Meyer and worked for a large furniture store on
West Congress Street until he lost it in May of 1948.
213
Freddy and Joe are two of
three Anglo-Mexican pachucos documented in Tucson. The fact that his father
socialized with Mexicans was likely indicative of his lower-class social standing
among the local hierarchies.
The last of Sapo’s friends that Barker interviewed was Ernest S., also known
as “Noisy.” He was the smallest of Sapo’s gang and the youngest at age 15. He got
his name as a joke to the fact that he did not talk much. Ernest was born in Tucson
but lived in Phoenix from age 4-11 where he learned his first caló words. At the age
of 12, he returned to Tucson where he lived with his parents on Convent Street and
attended Safford Junior High School. Most of the caló he knew, he learned in
Tucson and he got to practice it both at school and at home with his father.
214

These brief biographical statements are unfortunately the most we know
about Tucson pachucos’ background. They reveal evidence of the post-Riots
developments in pachuco culture including: some continued recognition of El Paso
as important to pachuco culture; continued participation of Tucson Native Americans
in pachuco culture; a strong influence of the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture

212
Barker, 28-29.

213
Ibid., 29.

214
Ibid.

174

as it coexisted with the Tucson version; as well as the spread of the culture through
migration, military service, musical performances, record distribution, and public
jukeboxes.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s pachuco culture transitioned from the
1942 Los Angeles version, strongly associated with zoot culture, into something new
that was still called pachuco but looked very different. The army uniform was
incorporated into everyday pachuco wear. The culture also evolved into two primary
avenues, vato loco and lowrider culture. The origins of this were visible in the
significance attributed by pachucos to having a car to cruise in. The final Tucson
youth addressed in this chapter is indicative of the transitions in pachuco culture
during the early to mid 1950s.
RENATO ROSALDO
Renato Rosaldo’s parents moved to Tucson in the early 1950s when Rosaldo
was 13 years old.
215
Renato’s father was a Mexican immigrant and his mother was
Anglo. They could afford to live on the Anglo eastside of Tucson with his father’s
income as a professor at the University of Arizona. Despite living in the Anglo
eastside and being of a middle class background, Rosaldo felt he could relate to his
working class Mexican American counterparts who attended the only high school in
town, Tucson High School.
He and his friends started a palomilla (gang/clique) and called themselves
“Los Chasers.” There were 13 members from all over Tucson, but most of them

215
Montezemolo, Fiamma. "Conversando Con Renato Rosaldo." Revista de Antropologia Social 12
(2003): 321-45.

175

were from Barrio Hollywood in northwest Tucson. Barrio Hollywood was a
Mexican American neighborhood which got its name from residents who were
slightly better off financially than other Mexican Americans, and had the reputation
for thinking and acting like they were movie stars. Rosaldo joked that it was because
they all wore sun glasses.
216
Francis Montano, addressed earlier in this chapter,
married a Mexican man from Barrio Hollywood and lived there beginning in 1948.
Montano also joked that the barrio was labeled such “because people look like movie
stars.”
Having a car was central to Los Chasers. The one member of the group who
had a car lived farther east than Rosaldo. He would drive through town and pick up
Rosaldo and others as he made his way west to Barrio Hollywood. They all went to
high school together and wore a jacket that served as a uniform. By the mid to late
1950s, Rosaldo estimated that one third of his high school peers were Mexican
American, and about 8% were African American.
217

Amongst Los Chasers, they spoke Spanish and a mix of Spanish and English
to each other. They would spend a lot of time together, talking about young women,
and playing word games in which they made fun of each other and each other’s
mothers. They would also play sports like baseball and football. To meet women,
they would go out to the Casino Ballroom, or were invited by Anglo girls to crash
parties which often led to confrontations and fights.

216
Montezemolo, Revista. 322.

217
Rosaldo’s estimates are likely overestimated on both counts.

176

While most of the members of Los Chasers were working class, Rosaldo and
another boy were middle class exceptions which made this group a little different
from the majority of working class gangs. The other boy was the son of a Mexican
lawyer and Director of La Alianza Hispano Americana in Tucson but his exact
identity was not revealed. Rosaldo presumes this boy became a lawyer. Founded in
Tucson in 1894, the Alianza had a long history of serving as a mutual aid society for
ethnic Mexicans in the Southwest.
218
Despite these youths’ association with the
Chasers gang, many of the working class youth went on to pursue an education and
professional careers. One of the working class boys became a surgeon. Another
specifically told Rosaldo that he was so inspired by Rosaldo and his father that he
went to college and became, first an elementary school teacher and eventually a
school principal.
Rosaldo graduated from high school in 1959 and did well enough to go to
Harvard for his bachelors in Spanish History and Literature, and a Ph.D. in
Anthropology. He is one of the many former pachucos who did not fit the stereotype
of becoming school dropouts and juvenile delinquents, but rather became
professionals later in life. Cesar Chavez, the famous California civil rights leader,
was also a former pachuco who succeeded in life.
Renato Rosaldo did not refer to himself or his peers as pachucos specifically.
Los Chasers, however, were not created in a cultural vacuum. They existed a decade
after the term pachuco had been defined in 1942 and 1943. By the mid-fifties,

218
Sheridan, Thomas E. Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941. Tucson &
London: University of Arizona Press, 1992. 167-168.

177

pachuco culture was evolving into something else, which some continued to refer to
as pachuco, and others were beginning to use other terms including vatos locos or
cholos.
CONCLUSION
In the previous chapter, Tucson was addressed with regard to the state of
pachuco culture before the Zoot Suit Riots. Before 1943, El Paso was the place most
closely associated with pachuco culture. In Tucson, the local Native American
groups were among the first to be referred to as pachucos. The tattoo of the cross is
the most conspicuous evidence of Yaqui influence on pachuco culture throughout the
Southwest. During this time, migration served as the primary catalyst of the culture
as people moved back and forth between Juarez, El Paso, Tucson and Los Angeles.
The zoot culture of Los Angeles during the early years of WWII was first
influenced by the Tucson and El Paso versions of pachuco culture, and then
redefined as pachuco as a result of the newspaper coverage of the Sleepy Lagoon
Case and the Zoot Suit Riots.
After 1943, the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture influenced cities and
towns throughout the Southwest where pachuco culture grew in popularity. During
World War II, knowledge of pachuco culture continued to spread through migration
but also began to spread through service in the military. The Los Angeles version of
pachuco culture prevailed over the Tucson version but it did not completely eclipse
it. The influence of the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture, which was more
heavily associated with African Americans and jazz, did not necessarily mean that

178

African Americans and jazz came from Los Angeles to Tucson, but rather that part
of pachuco culture meant replicating the Los Angeles version by taking part in zoot
culture, jazz music, and an African American social scene. During the late 1940s,
the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture continued to influence the Southwest,
but was increasingly spread through musician’s cross-country tours, and the mass
production and distribution of music via records, jukeboxes, and radio. However,
the pachuco version emanating from Los Angeles was itself influenced by Tucson
and El Paso since the music created in Los Angeles, was that of Lalo Guerrero from
Tucson and Don Tosti from El Paso. While this chapter focused on the post-Riots
development of pachuco culture in Tucson Arizona, the next chapter will do the
same for El Paso Texas, with greater inclusion of Ciudad Juarez, the Southwest, and
Mexico City.

179

CHAPTER 5: PACHUQUISMO IN THE U.S. SOUTHWEST AND MEXICO

As the opening chapter of this dissertation attests, before there were pachucos
in El Paso, there were tirilis who were associated with marijuana and the El Paso-
Ciudad Juarez border region. Increasingly during the 1930s, El Paso came to be
nicknamed El Chuco. Pachuco culture did take shape in the region during the 1930s
and the most prominent aspects of it were pachuco calo, a connection to the city of
El Paso, marijuana use, and smuggling across the border. Pachuco culture from El
Paso made its way to Tucson and Los Angeles where it combined with the local
versions of the culture to make unique combinations. Nevertheless, Los Angeles
zoot culture was heavily influenced by African Americans, jazz, the jive dialect, and
zoot suits.
This chapter is the second half of the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez story which
began with Chapter 2. It explains the role of El Paso pachucos in Los Angeles
during the early 1940s when Los Angeles Mexican American zoot suiters were
increasingly referred to as pachucos. It also demonstrates how pachuco culture
spread throughout the U.S. Southwest and Mexico after pachuco culture came to be
identified popularly as a Los Angeles cultural phenomenon in 1943. El Paso, Ciudad
Juarez and Mexico City are the sites this chapter focuses on to tell this Southwestern,
yet transnational story.
Before making their way to California, youths from “El Chuco” lived a very
segregated experience in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso during the 1930s and early

180

1940s. In several respects, Segundo Barrio had a greater affinity with Ciudad Juarez
across the international border in Mexico, than it did with the northern half of the
city they lived in. Roberto Gomez, for example, recalled that both Mexican
American and African American youths had great difficulty attending movie theatres
in downtown El Paso because Anglo youth would gang up on them and assault them
if they tried to go north of Segundo Barrio.
219
Young sports players of color would
also join baseball and basketball leagues in Mexico because El Paso rarely allowed
youth of color to play in their leagues.
During the early 1940s, many El Pasoan Mexican American youth hopped on
freight trains and made their way to Los Angeles in search of more lucrative
economic opportunities and for the excitement of the big city. Hopping freights was
a common form of long distance travel for Mexican American youths. Gomez, for
example, wanted to help his family by working so he hopped on an open-box freight
train to Los Angeles. Or as he put it in calo, he caught “el cargero y nos
descontamos.”
220
One anonymous El Pasoan interviewed in the 1970s also recalled
how he and three friends jumped on a train without paying to get to Los Angeles.
221

Gabriel Cordoba, a Mexican American court interpreter for El Paso Courts, also

219
Roberto Gomez, November 28, 1976. Interviewed by Raymundo Gomez. Institute of Oral History,
University of Texas at El Paso.

220
Gomez Interview, 6.

221
Interview with Anonymous El Pasoan by Wendy S. Thompson , April 8, 1978, Interview No. 724,
Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. 7.

181

explained how there was a large group of pachucos from El Paso that were forced to
leave the city in the early 1940s or risk imprisonment.
222

Upon arrival to Los Angeles, these youths discovered that Mexican American
youth in Los Angeles were different from them. Early on, their Los Angeles
counterparts made fun of them by calling them pachucos. They were pachucos, both
because of their pachuco calo and their place of origin, the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez
border. Youth from El Paso had greater cultural influences from Mexico. Their
pachuco calo was more Spanish than it was English. Pachucos, on the other hand,
would make fun of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles by calling them “pochos.”
223

Historians of zoot culture in Los Angeles, such as Eduardo Pagan and Luis Alvarez,
have documented the significant influence of the English language and jazz culture
on Los Angeles Mexican American youth during the mid 1940s.
224

Many El Paso youth took part in juvenile delinquent acts in El Paso before
they made their way to Los Angeles. Both Diablo and Gomez knew El Paso police
authorities by name and spent minor time in jail.
225
They both recalled getting into
many fights during their youth in El Paso. This, however, does not mean that the

222
Letter from Cordova to Barker, George C. Barker Collection, Department of Special Collections,
The University of Arizona.

223
Pochos is a Spanish language term used to refer to Americanized people of Mexican descent. It is
commonly used with derogatory connotations.

224
Pagan, Eduardo Obregon. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.; Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the
Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II, American Crossroads: University of
California Press, 2008.

225
Interview with Anonymous El Pasoan. 10.

182

youth were necessarily criminal. Diablo, for example, explained that he and his
peers would get arrested by police for violating curfew even if they were right in
front of their own home. He added that they just accepted the way things were
because he and his counterparts back then “just got arrested and that’s it. You ain’t
got no rights.”
226
Alluding to the fact that now, as an adult, he is aware of his rights,
but during his youth he accepted the decisions of the police without question.
Discrimination against ethnic Mexican youth, however, was not limited to
police. Roberto Gomez explained that Anglo youth would gang up on him and his
friends, if and when they tried to venture north of Segundo Barrio to the movies, the
swimming pool or the park. He explained that when they did go north, Anglo youth
would beat them up. If they took a large group of boys to accompany them north,
they had a greater chance of successfully making it to their destination, but there
were also times when a large group of Anglo youth would intercept them and fight.
Gomez explained it was a no win situation because even if his group won the fight,
both Anglo gangs and police would later descend on Segundo Barrio en force in
vehicles to retaliate. Gomez explained that despite their rebellious attitudes and
criminal associations, Mexican American youth obeyed police to such an extent that
one officer would successfully detain a large group or beat up any youth the officer
pleased.
Once in Los Angeles they took part in local gangs, some of which were made
up of youths from El Paso. Both Gomez and Diablo dropped out of high school,

226
Interview with Anonymous El Pasoan, 9-10.

183

hopped on a freight train to Los Angeles, and settled in the Alpine and Temple
neighborhoods immediately north of downtown Los Angeles. Diablo joined a gang
made up of youth from El Paso. He took part in many gang activities including
going to dances and getting into fights. Gomez also knew the pachuco youths in
those same neighborhoods and befriended them, although he did not admit to any
fighting or gang affiliation during his interview in the 1970s. He simply preferred to
hang around “los batos de los barrios—hoodlums.”
227

It is relevant to note that gang activity during the early 1940s was nowhere
near as organized or deadly as they are in the twenty-first century. The “gangs” were
very loose affiliations without formal “initiation” rituals, nor a long term
commitment. They would get into many fights, especially with youth from other
gangs, but knives and chains were both rare, and the deadliest weapons used. The
majority of fights were one on one, and without the use of any weapons. Gomez
substantiated this by explaining in Spanish, “it used to be clean fights. One would
tangle up with another. The ‘baddest’ one would tangle up with the ‘baddest one’
from the other gang ... once in a while one of them would pull out a knife.”
228

Whereas Mexican immigrants made up the majority of the ethnic Mexican
population in Los Angeles during the 1920s, by 1940, Mexican Americans were the
majority. Zoot culture was very popular among this group in Los Angeles during the
early 1940s. El Paso pachuco culture and Los Angeles zoot culture coexisted in the

227
Gomez Interview, 5.

228
“Se agarraba uno con el otro. Se juntaban, y luego el mas maldito se agarraba con el mas
maldito de la otra ganga ... de vez en cuando uno de ellos sacaba un filero...”

184

various neighborhoods of Los Angeles. El Paso youth participated in zoot culture
enthusiastically, and all Mexican American participants of zoot culture were
increasingly referred to as pachucos. Many Mexican American youth who
participated in zoot culture did not identify as pachucos either because they
considered pachucos the same as Mexican American gang members or because they
participated in the zoot suit and jazz aspects of zoot culture more than in the pachuco
calo and ethnic Mexican identity aspects of pre-43 pachuco culture that came from
El Paso.
Specific neighborhoods where they coexisted include the Chavez Ravine area
including Alpine, Temple and downtown; Belvedere and Boyle Heights, and the strip
along Central Avenue from Lil Tokyo to Watts. The oral history from El Paso points
toward them living in the Chavez Ravine area and socializing in downtown.
Tucson’s interviewees made specific references to living in Boyle Heights and
Watts, with some mention of socializing in downtown as well. Mexican American
zoot-suiters from Los Angeles during the early 1940s lived primarily in Boyle
Heights, Belvedere, South Central, and Watts. They made references to dancing
throughout greater Los Angeles including; downtown, Hollywood, Central Avenue,
and along the beach from Long Beach in the south to Venice and Santa Monica
further north. Ultimately, downtown is where most of the intermixing between the
different types of pachucos took place.
Chavez Ravine was shared between sailors at the recently constructed Naval
Reserve base and ethnic residents which included many El Pasoan pachucos.

185

Downtown is also the area servicemen went on leave the most. The congregation of
El Pasoans in Chavez Ravine and their socializing in downtown helps explain the
participation of El Paso pachucos in the Zoot Suit Riots, and also helps explain why
the newspapers referred to all Mexican American zoot-suiters as pachucos.
Pachuco culture is often portrayed as being, culturally, neither Mexican nor
American. While there is truth to this, it does not take into account the fact that the
El Paso, pre Zoot Suit Riots, version of pachuco culture had a strong association with
ethnic Mexicans. This is partially due to the fact that El Paso Mexican American
youth had a strong sense of their Mexicaness because of their greater affinity with
Ciudad Juarez than the northern half of El Paso. The fact that many of these youths
spoke Spanish and pachuco calo with greater facility than standard English or jive,
also added to this separate identity.
When the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots took place, El Paso
youth were right in the middle of it. Diablo recalled getting into fights. Gomez did
not admit to fighting, but he knew the pachucos who did. He was also forced to
decide between fighting or fleeing during one incident, in which a trolley car he was
riding on was stopped by a group a servicemen searching for pachucos to assault and
dezoot. Gomez escaped through a trolley car window and ran away from the
servicemen.
229

One of the primary justifications for the servicemen’s actions against
Mexican American zoot suiters during the Riots was the assumption that pachucos

229
Roberto Gomez, Interview by Raymundo Gomez, November 28, 1976, Transcript No. 263,
Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. 56-57.

186

were unpatriotic. Recent scholars of zoot culture have analyzed the reasons they
were seen as unpatriotic. The psychoanalytic historian Mauricio Mazon
demonstrated the relationship between the xenophobia of World War II and the
identification of ethnic Mexicans as the largest local group of “foreigners.”
230

Historian Luis Alvarez demonstrated how the zoot suit represented an affront to
Anglo masculinity by occupying public space and refusing to be kept “in their
place.”
231
These scholars are correct in explaining how and why pachucos were
perceived by servicemen and the general public as unpatriotic.
My findings however, demonstrate a strong tendency among Mexican
Americans in general to serve in the U.S. military. As addressed in the previous
chapter approximately 350,000 Mexican Americans served during World War II and
arguably earned the greatest number of Congressional Medals of Honor, proportional
to the size of their population.
232
Pachucos from El Paso, Los Angeles, Tucson, and
even Ciudad Juarez Mexico also served in large proportions. Both Roberto Gomez
and Diablo volunteered for the U.S. military during World War II.
233
The service
was an important place where youths of all ethnic and racial groups from across the
country learned about each other. For many, it was the first time they personally met

230
Mazón, Mauricio. The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1984.

231
Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II,
American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008.

232
Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, ed. Mexican Americans and World War II. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2005. xvii.

233
Gomez Interview, and Anonymous Interview.

187

or interacted with Mexicans, African Americans, or Anglos.
234
Gomez, for example,
learned to speak English fluently during his time in the Marine Corp. Many Mexican
Americans from throughout the Southwest also recalled learning pachuco calo from
other Mexican Americans in the military.
Even though pachucos got their name from the tirili youths that came from El
Paso; after the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles became
THE place pachucos were most associated with. Historian Anthony Macias referred
to Los Angeles as the nation’s pachuco capital during World War II.
235
Along with
the association with Los Angeles, came a new definition of pachucos that largely
unknowingly combined the “tirili” of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez with the zoot suit-
jazz culture of Los Angeles, which emphasized the zoot suit over other aspects of
pachuco culture. While there were pachucos in Tucson prior to 1943, Yaqui
pachucos in particular, their numbers did not compare to the degree of participation
in zoot culture in Los Angeles, or to that of tirili culture in El Paso and Ciudad
Juarez. Hence, an association of pachuco culture with Tucson or Native Americans
was never prominent in Los Angeles or in El Paso/Ciudad Juarez. This however,
does not negate the fact that the tattoo of the cross, which came from Tucson Yaquis,
became popular in both Los Angeles and El Paso. Pachuco culture was also never
strongly associated with Ciudad Juarez outside of El Paso. This may have been

234
Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots.

235
Macias, Mexican American Mojo, 87.

188

because pachucos in Los Angeles emphasized their El Paso origins over their Juarez
associations.
Diablo’s experience in Los Angeles helps illustrate the coexistence of El Paso
and Los Angeles pachuco culture as well as the development of the culture. He was
a pachuco from El Paso who recalled that he and his colleagues were called
pachucos, zooters, and “jitterbug guys” in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles he went to
many dances, got into fights and joined a gang of pachucos. He lied about his age at
work so that they would not force him to go to school four days a week. He also
bought a fraudulent draft card because some ballrooms required one to get in.
Diablo joined a gang of El Paso youths that hung around Temple Street between
Figueroa and Grand. His gang would often get into fights with youths from other
gangs. One practice was a form of urban lassoing. They would tie a long chain to a
moving vehicle and drive next to rival gang members standing on corners. They
would swing the chain which would wrap around the victim’s leg and drag him to
the floor.
236
Indicative of the lowrider culture to come in the late 1940s and early
1950s, Diablo and his pachuco friends would put sandbags in the cars to lower their
profile.
Diablo felt the gang of El Paso youths he belonged to was fairly dominant,
but he recalled one rival in particular that gave them a lot of trouble. Chico was a
pachuco from San Antonio who got raped by a guy from El Paso when he was in
prison. When Chico got out of jail, he came out with a vengeance against El Paso

236
Anonymous Interview, 16.

189

pachucos. He was notorious for his ability with knives, reportedly with one on each
hand. On one occasion at a dance hall on Temple and First Street, Chico cut two
guys, one in the arm and another in the stomach. Then Diablo’s group jumped Chico
outside with a 2x4 and cut his butt across both cheeks. On another night, Chico
caught Diablo at a restaurant and he remembered running away for his life. Chico
was not alone as he also had a gang he belonged to. In one scuffle, Diablo admitted
to hitting one of the gang members in the face with a pipe that broke the victim’s
teeth and nose. Ultimately, one of Diablo’s friends caught Chico downtown,
knocked him out, and cut both his wrists so he could not use his knives again. Chico
survived, but was reported to have lived the rest of his life with his hands folded in
because of damage done to his wrists.
237

During the Zoot Suit Riots, Diablo explained that pachuco gangs made a
truce with each other to organize against the servicemen. He recalled between two
and three hundred pachucos making a truce and only gang which refused to all with
the rest. One friend in particular, named Paddy Gilbert, was beaten up by sailors,
and then retaliated wholeheartedly. After the Riots, he recalled that many pachucos
began to wear Levis, a sweater, and loafers so they would not bothered by police.
Both Anthony Macias and Luis Alvarez have documented other popular styles worn
by youth on an everyday basis, as an alternative to the zoot suit.
238

237
Anonymous Interview, 18-20.

238
Macias, Mexican American Mojo; Alvarez, Power of the Zoot.

190

After his participation in the Zoot Suit Riots, Diablo returned to El Paso at
the age of 17 where he continued his pachuco ways. With the increased cultural
capital Diablo earned with his participation in the Zoot Suit Riots and Los Angeles
gangs, he started a gang of his own back in his old block on Campbell Street in
Barrio Segundo of El Paso. His gang congregated on Fifth Street and Campbell and
consisted of about 15 youths. Other gangs included Ninth St, Park St, Barrio del
Diablo, the Chihuahua gang, Charles gang, and Mesa St. His gang fought with other
Barrio Segundo gang members, with youth from Juarez, and Puerto Ricans stationed
at Fort Bliss. Within a couple of years, Diablo was recruited by a trainer to try his
luck at boxing. Diablo got away from the gang by becoming a boxer and was soon
thereafter, drafted by the military where he continued to box.
239

When Diablo returned to El Paso, the lexicon on pachuco culture had evolved
to the point where he was no longer considered a pachuco, but more so a “kalifa.” It
was as if middle class Spanish language newspaper journalists from Los Angeles’ La
Opinion wanted to distance their local ethnic community from these youths by
emphasizing the term “pachuco” and its association with El Paso, Texas. Many
Spanish language journalists of La Opinion were also from Mexican cities like
Guadalajara and Mexico City, and their reporting included efforts to distance
pachucos from the cultural “purity” of Mexico proper.
240
The counterparts of La
Opinion in El Paso reported in similar terms, but without the possibility of negating

239
Anonymous Interview, 23-24, 43.

240
Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie. "Ignacio E. Lozano: The Mexican American Exile Publisher Who
Conquered San Antonio and Los Angeles." American Journalism 21, no. 1 (2004): 75-89.

191

the association between El Chuco and pachucos. In June of 1943 the journalists of
the El Pasoan Spanish language newspaper El Continental could not completely
disassociate themselves from pachucos, so they chose share the association with
others by including the terms tirilis, kalifas, and tarzanes along with pachucos.
Whereas pachucos were associated with El Paso; kalifas were associated with
California, and Los Angeles more specifically; tirilis were associated with the
general border area of Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua Mexico and El Paso, Texas USA;
tarzanes were associated with Mexican urban areas, especially Mexico City but
including Ciudad Juarez to some extent.
These terms, however, were not created by journalists. The terms used to
describe pachuco culture in El Paso were more developed in El Paso and Juarez.
Pachucos from Los Angeles could not be “pachucos” to them because their
definition of pachucos was intimately connected to El Paso. To residents of “El
Chuco, Texas,” the nickname for El Paso, pachucos from Los Angeles needed to be
called something else, hence their use of the term “kalifas” for pachucos from
California.
The reporters and editors of El Continental never explicitly defined these
terms, nor did they explicitly state they wished to disassociate themselves from
pachucos. They did however report on the topic and pachuco events in Los Angeles
in a manner that made use of all the variety of terms. One columnist of El
Continental, with the alias Fray Callejero (meaning Street Friar), printed a series of
articles in June of 1943 as part of his regular column called Divagaciones de un

192

Flojo (Wanderings of a Lazy One) in which he explained to the public what he
understood to be the origin of pachucos.
241
He did not hide his disdain for pachucos,
tirilis, and kalifas which were all essentially tarzanes to him.
He defined the terms through his use of them, but he also broadened the
definition through his explanation of the origins of pachucos as he understood it. At
its essence, Callejeros’s description of tarzanes came down to various historical
forms of effeminate machismo. Through his historical examples, from Adam and
Eve, to Nero and Poppea, as well as Hernan Cortes and Doña Marina, Callejero
explained the aspects of pachuco culture that were so common in humanity that they
had been present throughout human history. On the other hand, his dislike for
pachucos was also evident in his explanation of these aspects. Nevertheless, in
explaining his dislike for pachucos, this columnist of El Continental helps us
understand the perception of pachucos in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez during the mid
1940s. While the best historical sources for this topic would be oral history from
1940s pachucos recorded during that decade such as the recording by Barker for
Tucson pachucos, non-pachuco documentary evidence such as newspapers and court
documents such as those from the Sleepy Lagoon Case and the Zoot Suit Riots in
Los Angeles are far less abundant in El Paso. It is for this reason that the series of
articles Callejero printed in his column are important documentary evidence that
deserve extensive attention.

241
Callejero, Fray. "Por Si Usted No Lo Sabia." El Continental, June 8, 1943.

193

Fray Callejero began his series of articles by arguing that pachucos did not
come from El Paso in particular,
I must make the clarification, for the tranquility of the residents of El Paso and
Juarez that this useless being that robs the oxygen from the working people who
should enjoy it, is not native to these lands.
242

Callejero goes on to explain that there have been pachuco types in the world
throughout history. To him, tirilis, kalifas, and pachucos were all essentially
tarzanes; and tarzanes did not originate in Mexican urban areas exclusively. In his
view, pachuquismo ultimately had to do with effeminate manliness. The first
tarzanes he introduced were Adam and Eve. Some of the pachuco cultural
characteristics they possessed included long haired men and scantly clad women.
243

His second article on the topic jumped from the children of Adam and Eve to
the Roman Empire.
244
To Callejero, the children of Adam and Eve were “real”
tarzans. They were agile, jumping from tree to tree, unlike modern tarzans that were
only agile at evading police and robbing. This is an indication of his understanding
of pachuco culture as being associated with criminality, despite the actual veracity of
the reputation. “Neron y Popea” were his first examples of Roman tarzans. He was
referring to Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (AD 37 – AD 68) the fifth
and final Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and Poppea Sabina who was

242
Author’s Translation from the original in Spanish. “Debo hacer la aclaracion, para la tranquilidad
de los habitantes de El Paso y Ciudad Juarez que este ser inservible que roba el oxigeno que
unicamente deberian disfrutar los que trabajan, no es propio ni nativo de estas tierras.”

243
Callejero, Fray. "Por Si Usted No Lo Sabia." El Continental, June 8, 1943.

244
Ibid., "Y Asi, La Semilla Quedo Sembrada." El Continental, June 9, 1943, 2.

194

one of his wives. Poppea Sabina was a beautiful woman known for persuading Nero
to kill his and her rivals, including Nero’s mother. Fray Callejero was likely aware
of the classic depiction of Nero as an extravagant tyrant.
245
Callejero saw Nero’s
strong personality as tarzan-like, as he also saw Poppea Sabina’s deceitfulness as
tarzana-like. The latter is similar to his depiction of Eve as tarzana-like as well. It
was also significant for Callejero to depict “Nero y Popea” performing the pachuco
cultural characteristic of dancing. It is not that dancing was seen as an exclusive
pachuco phenomenon, but rather that pachuco culture was associated with dancing.
For his example of a “tarzan” of the Middle Ages, Callejero began with
Marco Polo.
246
Aspects that made him pachuco-esque were Polo’s long hair and
“balloon” pants. Callejero thought Polo’s alleged chewing of silk worms was akin to
pachucos who always chewed gum. Polo allegedly learned the “KanKan” dance
from Ghengis Khan and brought back with him Asian women that he sold for profit,
as tarzans of his time would also allegedly sell their female “tirilillas.” In
Callejero’s interpretation, these men who visited the East helped create in the West
an interest in men for having multiple women at once, which at its worst had also
created serial killers of women. The tarzans of the Middle Ages were very manly
because they fought in tournaments “man to man” unlike modern kalifas with their
use of icepicks and chains for weapons. This serves as an acknowledgement of the
increased use of small weapons and their being frowned upon as “unmanly.”

245
Holland, Richard. Nero: The Man Behind the Myth. Stroud: Sutton, 2000.

246
Callejero, Fray. "En La Edad Media." El Continental, June 10, 1943. 2.

195

In Callejeros’ tarzan lens of world history, the tarzans of the Middle Ages
were the men who fought in tournaments at the coliseum. They did not have much
opportunity with women because they were chaperoned and protected from tarzans.
These chaperones, he explained, were the equivalent of Dona Brigida, the governess
who did her best to get in the way of the mythical Spanish womanizer Don Juan and
his fiancée Dona Ines. This again, makes reference to pachucos as womanizers.
During the Renaissance, knights were tarzans who won the hearts of damsels
with their adventures and disregard for life. Finally making a historical connection
to the Americas, Callejero says that Hernan Cortes was the tarzan of Dona Marina.
Marina is also derisively referred to as La Malinche, meaning the traitor, in Mexican
historiography. To Callejero, she was the first to fall for the men of the old world,
and her 1943 counterparts were the women who worked in cabarets in Mexico.
After showing this disdain for alleged “pachucas,” Callejero compares pachucos to
peacocks saying they are dumb and presumptuous. Beau Brummel, the British man
at times credited as the father of dandyism, is another example of historical
pachuquismo, according to Callejero, since Brummel was known to devote hours
everyday to his appearance, and women loved him for it.
247

In his final article of the pachuco series printed June 13, 1943, Fray Callejero
focused entirely on his understanding of the origins of pachuquismo in Mexico, the
United States, and El Paso in particular.
248
He begins with the year 1919 when

247
Callejero, Fray. "La Edad De Oro Del "Tarzanismo"." El Continental, June 1943.

248
Ibid., "El Salto Mortal." June 13, 1943.

196

soldiers returned from World War I allegedly wanting to block out the noise of war
with the “noise” of Jazz. He then jumps to 1928 and the dance of the Charleston
which the famous Mexican actress, Lupe Velez, danced in “famous” competitions at
the Lirico Theatre in Mexico City. This may have simply been in line with the fact
that the Mexican capital has a long history of being much more cosmopolitan and in-
tune with the world’s cultural trends than the rest of the country.
249

Along with Mexico City, Callejero witnessed the “flapper” cultural
phenomenon take hold all over the world. The most important aspect of flappers, in
his view, was the short hair style among women. During this time, he made
reference to a cultural predecessor of the tirili which he referred to as cinturitas
(small waists). No other sources refer to this cinturitas phenomenon, so it may be
largely lost to historical memory. By his description, however, we do learn a few
critical cultural characteristics of the cinturitas. Callejejo referred to them as the
direct predecessors to the tarzanes, kalifas, and tirilis of his time. They were called
cinturitas because their big balloon pants combined with their coats, which were
snug at the waist, to make their waist length seem extraordinarily narrow; hence the
name emphasizing the small waist. As an archetype of the cinturitas, Callejero
makes reference to Luis Romero Carrasco. He was a man who loved dressing well,
smoking marijuana, and dancing to such an extent that in 1929 he committed the

249
For example see,Viqueira Alban, Juan Pedro. Relajados o reprimidos?: diversiones publicas y vida
social en la Ciudad de Mexico durante el Siglo de las Luces. Fondo de Cultura Economica. 1987;
Viqueira Alban, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Sergio Rivera Ayala, eds. Propriety and Permissiveness in
Bourbon Mexico. Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2004.

197

quadruple murder of an entire family, including their pet, just to have enough money
to buy new balloon pants.
Then the columnist finally gets to the tarzanes of his time, which he referred
to as “tirilis” and “tarzanes.” The tall hat with short brim of the cinturitas grew and
grew with tirilismo (tirili culture) until it resembled an umbrella. And as if this was
not extravagant enough, Callejero adds, they added feathers to the hat. Pachuco
pants, according to Callejero, caused laughter and indignation among spectators. He
hoped and expected that pachuco caló, which he lamented hearing “decent people”
using on occasion, would not be practiced once the war and military discipline would
“detarzanize” pachucos.
The war did give many pachucos an opportunity to get past that phase of their
lives and become family men upon their return from the service. However, as
mentioned before, many Mexican American youth learned pachuco calo during their
military service. The war time economy gave more youth the knowledge and
economic means to partake in pachuco culture. Pachuco culture only continued to
spread throughout the U.S. Southwest and parts of Mexico during and after the War.
It spread to such an extent that even “decent” people, as Callejero called them,
increasingly participated in the pachuco lexicon.
Ultimately, to Callejero, pachucos were participants in a long historical
tradition of effeminate manliness. They were identified by their long hair,
extravagant attire, womanizing, and susceptibility to moral corruption. While kalifas
were traceable to El Paso’s pachucos, they were part of a larger historical cultural

198

archetype he referred to as tarzanes. Despite Callejero’s hatred toward pachucos, the
articles he printed in June 1943 as part of his column for El Continental helped us
learn about the notion of pachuquismo in El Paso at the time. Were it not for his
articles, we would not know about the distinctions between kalifas, tirilis, pachucos
and tarzanes as understood in the El Paso/Juarez border area, during and following
the Zoot Suit Riots. Both Diablo recollections and Callejero’s articles help us
understand the pachuco and non-pachuco understanding of pachuco culture in El
Paso during the mid 1940s. During this period however, mass produced and mass
distributed music and films help us understand the continued spread of pachuco
culture throughout the Southwest and urban Mexico.
THE SPREAD OF PACHUCO CULTURE VIA MASS PRODUCTION
Whereas before the Zoot Suit Riots, pachuco culture was primarily spread
through the migration of people, most notably tirilis from El Paso who hopped
freights toward Los Angeles; after the Riots, the culture was still spread through the
movement of people, such as musicians on tour, men in the service, and both sexes
migrating to places with greater employment opportunities during the wartime
economy, but increasingly the culture was also spread via the mass production and
dissemination of music and film through records, radio, jukeboxes, and theatre.
Edmundo Martinez Tostado, “Don Tosti,” was introduced in chapter two and
mentioned again in the fourth chapter. The current chapter will address in greater
detail his role with regard to the spread of pachuco culture throughout the U.S.
Southwest. As mentioned in chapter two, Tostado grew up in El Paso’s Segundo

199

Barrio as a musical prodigy. Born in 1923, he fit right in with the Mexican
American Generation that came of age during the 1940s. He moved to Los Angeles
(Boyle Heights) in 1939 at the age of 16 where he finished high school and
continued his musical education.
During the late 1940s, he recorded a few pachuco themed records that made
him extremely popular among pachucos throughout the Southwest. Pachuco Boogie,
recorded in 1948 and sold over a million records, is the song in which he talks about
coming “from El Paso, where pachucos like me come from.”
250
In addition to
providing evidence of El Paso as a place of origin for pachuquismo, this song is also
indicative of the combination of the El Paso pachuco culture with the Los Angeles
version. In this same song, there is a section of scat singing demonstrating the
influence of Los Angeles Jazz, jive, and zoot culture. The fact that the song was
recorded in the jazz genre is further evidence of the jazz influence. Eduardo “Lalo”
Guerrero, addressed in the previous chapter, had written and performed pachuco
themed songs before Don Tosti’s recording of Pachuco Boogie; but Guerrero’s songs
were not recorded in the jazz genre of boogie until the year after Tosti’s Pachuco
Boogie was released. This song also made use of the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez word
“tirili,” which was never used popularly in Los Angeles. His song called “El Tirili”
also reinforced his use of the El Paso-origin word tirili.
Other pachuco themed songs that Don Tosti recorded during the late 1940s
included Wine-O-Boogie, Guisa Gacha, Guisa Guaina, Pachuco Mambo, Los Blues,

250
Varela, Chuy. Liner Notes, Pachuco Boogie: Featuring Don Tosti. El Cerrito: Arhoolie
Productions, 2002. 11.

200

and Chicano Boogie. Pachuco Boogie and Wine-O-Boogie were in the jazz genre of
boogie woogie. The historian Anthony Macias referred to them as part of their own
musical style called pachuco boogie woogie.
251
Guisa Gacha (Mean Woman) and
Guisa Guaina (Alcoholic Woman) were the b-sides of the boogie records. These b-
sides were reflective of the increasing popularity of the Latin American genres of
mambo, danzon and guaracha, principally from Cuba, but also from Mexico and
New York.
His song Los Blues had an obvious blues influence, but Chicano Boogie is
more noteworthy. It demonstrated the mixture of influences from rhythm & blues,
boogie, and rumba. The scat singing was more prominent than in any other song of
his, as was his pachuco calo. His choice to use the word Chicano in the lyrics, and
his choice to use the word in the title, is an important documentation of early uses of
the term. The use of the word Chicano was common among performers from the El
Paso Juarez area. An example of this is from German “Tin Tan” Valdes’ use of
Chicano in his1945 performance recorded in Mexico City.
252
While we don’t get
much sense of what Tosti meant by his use of the word in Chicano Boogie, Valdes
used it in the form of referring to working class ethnic Mexicans, not Mexican
Americans.
In this recording Tin Tan was singing a classic “country” Mexican song
called Alla en el rancho grande (Over there in the Big Ranch). In this recording, Tin

251
Macias, Anthony Foster. Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in
Los Angeles, 1935-1968: Duke University Press, 2008. 124.

252
Valdes, Rosalia. La Historia Inedita De Tin Tan: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 2003. Compact Disk.

201

Tan is scolded by his sidekick Marcelo for singing the classic “Chicano” song in the
style of a U.S. “country” song. Tin Tan goes on to sing the same song in various
genres including an Argentinean tango, a Cuban mambo, a Spanish flamenco, and a
jazz inspired version that included scat singing. The historian Anthony Macias also
explained that while the term Chicano was most popular with regards to politicized
Mexican Americans during the 1960s, pachucos often referred to each other as
Chicanos.
253
This chapter adds that its use was most common among pachucos from
El Paso and Juarez, like Don Tosti and Tin Tan.
In addition to the genres of music that fall within the broader category of
jazz, there were other songs within Mexican and Tex-Mex genres that were created
through out the U.S. Southwest that were pachuco and jazz influenced. Similarly to
how Tin Tan remade the classic Mexican “country” song “Alla en el rancho grande”
into various other genres, there were individual musicians and bands that also created
pachuco and jazz influenced songs within their own genres, including Mexican
rancheras, corridos, and Tex-Mex conjuntos. The first of these was the corridos in
which groups that sang Mexican music, sang songs about pachucos, such as Las
Hermanas Mendoza’s Los Pachucos. Then there were also pachucos who remade
Mexican corridos into their own pachuco versions with calo lyrics, such as the
remake of El Hijo Desobediente mentioned in Chapter 4. Beatrice Griffith
documented this in her discussion of pachucos in Los Angeles; as did George Barker

253
Macias, Mexican American Mojo, 9.

202

with regard to pachucos in Tucson.
254
German Valdes, from Ciudad Juarez, also
became famous by singing pachuco songs with his guitar. Then there were Tex-Mex
songs created in less urban places throughout the Southwest in which the swing and
mambo genres were infused into the accordion conjuntos in Texas.
255
The conjunto
Alamo, Los Hermanos Yanez, and Conjunto San Antonio Alegre are all groups who
created songs with jazz and pachuco influences within their Tejano conjunto genres.
Pachuco music was the raison d'être for German Valdez succeeding first as a radio
disk jockey in Ciudad Juarez, then as Tin Tan in Mexican films during the Golden
Age of Mexican cinema.
Tin Tan brought pachuco culture from the Ciudad Juarez and El Paso border
area to Mexico at large. The second chapter of this work concluded with the
upbringing of German Valdes. From the age of 13, he was raised in the border city
of Ciudad Juarez where Valdes learned Spanglish, and pachuco calo in particular, to
such an extent that he identified as Mexican American without ever having lived on
the U.S. side of the border. In Ciudad Juarez during the 1930s and early 1940s, he
worked for a radio station where he played the role of a pachuco along with other
roles. His pachuco radio personality caught the attention of a Mexican traveling
vaudeville show. His first appearance was in El Paso Texas, followed by acts
throughout the U.S. Southwest which culminated in Mexico City. In the Mexican
capital, he was contracted by a director of Mexican cinema to portray the pachuco

254
Griffith, Beatrice. American Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948.

255
Varela, Chuy. Liner Notes, Pachuco Boogie: Featuring Don Tosti. El Cerrito: Arhoolie
Productions, 2002. 11.

203

archetype in films throughout the 1940s. His films brought him international fame
throughout Latin America. The primary role he performed in his early films during
the 1940s was that of the pachuco. Primary examples of the films in which he
portrayed a pachuco include one named after the corrido popular among pachucos El
Hijo Desobediente (1945), and El Rey del Barrio (1949). Even though Mexico City
had pachucos they referred to as tarzanes, Tin Tan continued to use the term
pachuco. According to at least one article, Mexico city’s elite despised Tin Tan’s
antics which they saw as examples of “Mexicans near or across the border who have
ruined their Spanish without ever quite learning English” and as leader of “the
barbarian invasion from the North.”
256
It is worth noting that German Valdes was
not very successful early on while touring throughout the Soutwest, especially when
he was first recruited from Juarez in 1943, in places like Los Angeles right after the
Zoot Suit Riots; but when he arrived to Mexico City, his popularity exploded rapidly,
first through his public performances, with his films throughout Mexico, the U.S.
Southwest, and Latin America.
257

This chapter has sought to explain how pachuco culture from El Paso
influenced the Los Angeles version of zoot culture; as well as how the Los Angeles
version was popularized throughout the Southwest and urban Mexico where it
coexisted with local versions of the culture (such as tirilis and tarzanes). This
chapter was for El Paso, a parallel of what the previous chapter was for Tucson, a

256
"The Theater: Authentic Pachuco." Time Magazine, July 10, 1944.

257
Francisco Miller, Grandes Comediantes Vol. 1. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2004.

204

post Riots explanation of pachuco culture. Pachucos in El Paso made their way to
Los Angeles by hoping freights and playing a significant role in what came to be
understood as “pachuco” in Los Angeles. They returned to El Paso and spread their
knowledge of the Los Angeles version. The Los Angeles version had to be
reconciled with the El Paso version and one of its results was the introduction of the
term kalifa. As in the creation of pachuco culture, Ciudad Juarez played a significant
role in the post Riots spread of the culture when one of its own spread their version
through the films of German Valdes “Tin Tan.”

205

CONCLUSION

There were various cultural precursors that coalesced to constitute pachuco
culture during the early 1940s. There were several cultural characteristics from El
Paso and Ciudad Juarez that came to be associated with pachuco culture in other
places. The history of these sister cities allowed for the creation of a context in
which it could all take place. A major entry point for Mexican immigration,
railroads, the Mexican Revolution, and Prohibition; they all played a role in creating
the context for pachuquismo to take hold. Tirilis, with their associations to
marijuana, pachuco calo, smuggling, and ethnic Mexicans from both sides of the
border, were the immediate cultural precursor to pachucos.
Tucson youth learned from both El Paso and Los Angeles about pachuco
culture. They combined what they learned with their own demographics and needs
to create their own version of pachuco culture. In Tucson’s case, they were unique
in the Native American influence of the culture, yet they were much in tune with
other cities, and contributed to the culture more broadly with the tattoo of the cross.
Los Angeles zoot culture incorporated the El Paso and Tucson versions of
pachuco culture into their own. While youth cultures are rarely defined in a concrete
and self-contained manner, the Los Angeles version of pachuco culture was defined
by newspapers and court documents to a level it never would have otherwise been.
The Los Angeles version from 1943 is the primary version of pachuco culture that
has survived since. Pachuco culture did evolve into other forms after the 1940s,

206

most notably, lowrider and vato loco/cholo culture. It also had to be reconciled in
places like Tucson, El Paso, and Mexico City, with the versions of pachuco culture
that were already there before the Los Angeles version came to overshadow the other
versions. Part of this reconciliation process however, involved the coexistence of the
Los Angeles version with the local version, even when the former predominated.
Prior to the Zoot Suit Riots, pachuco culture was primarily spread via the
migration of ethnic Mexicans. The principal cultural aspect that defined pachucos
was their use of pachuco calo. After the Zoot Suit Riots, pachuco culture became
principally identified by the use of the zoot suit, but was also associated with jazz
music, dance, African Americans, and Los Angeles. While the movement of people
continued to play a role in the spread of pachuco culture, such as in military service
or hopping on a freight train and moving for better employment opportunities, the
mass production of music and film along with its dissemination via records, radio,
jukeboxes, and theatres played a larger role in the spread of pachuco culture
throughout the U.S. Southwest and urban Mexico after 1943.
I hope this work of scholarship has provided the reader with a better notion of
the creation and evolution of pachuco culture during the first half of the twentieth
century from El Chuco, to La Tus, to Los, back to Juarilez, and on to la capirucha
(Mexico City).

207

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 6th ed. New York:
Pearson Longman, 2007.

Alvarez, Luis Alberto. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During
World War II, American Crossroads: University of California Press, 2008.

_____. "The Power of the Zoot: Race, Community, and Resistance in American
Youth Culture, 1940--1945." 2001.

Barker, George Carpenter Collection. Southwest Folklore Center and Special
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APPENDIX: SELECT REFERENCES

Archival and Manuscripts Collections
George C. Barker Collection, Southwest Folklore Center and Special Collections of
the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

Charlotta Bass Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and
Research, Los Angeles.

Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Mt.
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Oral History Collection, Special Collections Department of the University of Texas
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University of California, Los Angeles.

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El continental

La opinion

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Herald and Express

New York Times

Time Magazine

215

Oral Histories

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Estrella, Jose Ramon. Interviewed by author September 21, 2007. Fullerton,
California.

Gomez, Roberto. Interviewed November 28, 1976. Institute of Oral History.
Department of Special Collections. University of Texas, El Paso

Montano, Francis. Interviewed by Lydia Otero, Ph.D. Tucson, Arizona, 2005.

Moreno, Albert. Interviewed by author April 24, 2005. Tucson, Arizona.

Olivas, Ramon. Interviewed by author October 17, 2007. Tucson, Arizona.

Osuna, Jesus F. Interviewed by author October 8, 2007. Tucson, Arizona.

Rosaldo, Renato. Interviewed by author October 28, 2009. Riverside, California.

Sandoval, Tommy. Interviewed by author October 19, 2007. Tucson, Arizona.

Torres, Marcia. pseudonym, Interviewed by author October 16, 2007. Tucson,
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216

Salinas, Raul R. Homenaje Al Pachuco, University of Southern California, Audio-
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Tovares, Joseph. "Zoot Suit Riots." Boston, Mass.: PBS Home Video, 2002.

Valdez, Luis, "Zoot Suit." Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles Calif.), Universal
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www.brownpride.com Accessed in 2003.

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www.suavecito.com Accessed in 2002.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Licon, Gerardo (author)

Core Title Pachucas, pachucos, and their culture: Mexican American youth culture of the Southwest, 1910-1955

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 11/10/2009

Defense Date 10/14/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag borderlands,calo,Chicano,Chicano history,Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, MX,culture,El Paso, TX,ethnic studies,Hispanic,Latino,Los Angeles, CA,Mexican American,Mexico City, D.F.,Native Americans,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pachuca,pachuco,Race relations,Southwest,Tucson, AZ,twentieth century,United States history,World War II,Yaqui tribe (Yoeme),youth culture,zoot suit

Place Name land regions: Southwest (geographic subject), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sanchez, George J. (committee chair), Iwamura, Jane Naomi (committee member), Kurashige, Lon (committee member)

Creator Email glicon@usc.edu,pachucotirili@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2723

Unique identifier UC1423431

Identifier etd-Licon-3364 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-273366 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2723 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Licon-3364.pdf

Dmrecord 273366

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Licon, Gerardo

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu